Writing the Self: Henry James and America

Citation preview

WRITING THE SELF: HENRY JAMES AND AMERICA

For John, Mary and Ginger

WRITING THE SELF: HENRY JAMES AND AMERICA

by

Peter Collister

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2007

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com 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 without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 2007 © Peter Collister 2007 british library cataloguing in publication data Collister, Peter Writing the self: Henry James and America 1. James, Henry, 1843–1916 – Criticism and interpretation 2. James, Henry, 1843–1916 – Travel – North America 3. Identity (Psychology) in literature I. Title 813.4 ISBN-13: 9781851968718

∞ This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed in the United Kingdom at Athenaeum Press Ltd.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

vi vii

1 Letting Yourself Go: James Arrives in Twentieth-Century America 2 Surrendering to the Messages of New York 3 Boston and Cambridge: Initiations from the Past 4 Asking ‘as few questions as possible’ in Arcadian New England 5 Hearing the Voices of the South 6 ‘Unwritten history’: The Romance of James’s Civil War Stories 7 ‘Doing something’ for the Soldiers of the Civil War 8 Life-Writing for the Man of Letters 9 ‘An influence beyond my notation’: The Self-Reflexive Figures of ‘The Jolly Corner’ 10 Opening Doors into The Sense of the Past 11 ‘A Round of Visits’: Effects Achieved ‘without the aid of the ladies’ 12 Waking up to ‘some pretty big things’ in The Ivory Tower

1 14 31 50 68 81 98 111 138 156 174 192

Notes Bibliography Index

211 243 255

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful for the kindness of a number of friends and former colleagues who offered support and advice. They include Lai Wan Chiu, Wendy Furniss, Celia Heath, Paul Higginson and Christina Rathbone. Judith Lyons generously read some of my work in draft form, and Howard M. Feinstein and Carol Holly were prompt in answering some queries. An assistant in the shop at Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (whose name I didn’t get), who helped locate one remaining copy of a book on Il Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen late on a Sunday evening, also earned my gratitude. The staff of the London Library and the British Library (especially Piotr Konczyk) have been most helpful, and the Brunel University Library and Wellcome Library, London, also hospitably opened their doors.

– vi –

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AS

Henry James, The American Scene, ed. Leon Edel (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1968). Aut Henry James: Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, The Middle Years, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). CN The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). CT The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, 12 vols (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1962–4). HJL Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974–84), vol. I: 1843–75; vol. II: 1875–83; vol. III: 1883–95; vol. IV: 1895–1916. IT Henry James, The Ivory Tower, ed. Percy Lubbock (London: Collins, 1917). JF F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family: A Group Biography (New York: Knopf, 1947). LCA Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York and Cambridge: Library of America, 1984). LCF Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York and Cambridge: Library of America, 1984). Life Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). SP Henry James, The Sense of the Past, ed. Percy Lubbock (London: Collins, 1917).

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1 LETTING YOURSELF GO: JAMES ARRIVES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA

In The Sacred Fount, that novel in which legendarily little happens beyond the convoluted searching for the secrets of a mysterious, suspected relationship during an English country house weekend, a small group of people discuss a painting of an unknown person holding a mask. The portrait itself initiates questions, but the group of observers contains its own mysteries. Those who observe are themselves observed. As part of a changing sequence of pairings and suspected pairings, Mrs Server (whose name suggests subservience or even a truncated form of observing) is restrained by the narrator and they wait ‘face to face, looking at each other, as if to catch a strain of music’. Even as they listen in together to a one-sided dialogue in which the silent listener is revealed to be ‘a distinguished painter’, that moment is subverted by an unfolding social transgression, indeed another cue for narrative possibility, as the narrator comes into eye contact with the listener. The man moves, ‘but not so as to interrupt – only so as to show me his face in a recall of what had passed between us the night before in the smoking-room’, and each breaks free from his unsuspecting companion in a silent liaison as their eyes catch: ‘I allowed myself to commune a little, across the shining space, with those of our fellow-auditor’. The room contains alternative communications and messages beyond the audible. The narrator, on the periphery of that more formal, expository conversation, cannot ‘quite follow it’, but he knows, because he can read it in the other’s expression, that it is gifted talk: ‘This was what his eyes indeed most seemed to throw over to me – “What an unexpected demon of a critic!”’1 When the narrator and his companion cross to join the others and look at the painting, Mrs Server surprises him by recognizing it, ‘showing more remembrance than I had attributed to her’: ‘“Oh yes, – the man with the mask in his hand!”’ In the novel’s contrived scheme of reciprocal losses and gains whereby people become young-looking or shine with intelligence at the expense of a more aged-looking or duller-growing partner, the narrator perceives that the speaker has now changed and appears ‘fairly distinguished’, even since the previ–1–

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ous evening. In this company of observers who engage in a series of encounters in which they are systematically surprised at the shifting mystery of individuals, it is unsurprising that the painting which draws them together should itself lay down signifiers capable of a variety of readings. Indeed, the narrator begs for Long, the ‘demon critic’, to repeat some of his points – ‘“It’s the picture, of all pictures, that most needs an interpreter”’ (p. 44) – and they must ‘“know what it means”’: 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, 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 (pp. 44–5).

Whatever the picture’s reference to some didactic Renaissance message, the detail of the pose suggests some courtly figure from the tradition of Commedia dell’Arte depicted by Watteau. The face and the mask invite multiple readings. The picture might be called ‘the Mask of Death’, but equally, because it is seen as ‘“blooming and beautiful”’, ‘the Mask of Life’, whilst the living man’s face might itself be Death. Though the mask, to one person, has ‘“an awful grimace”’ (p. 45), to others it is ‘“extremely studied”’ and ‘“charmingly pretty … I don’t see the grimace”’. The ‘distinguished painter’ in the group sees the mask, with an adjustment of gender, as depicting ‘a lovely lady’, indeed resembling the narrator’s companion, who is ‘“immensely obliged”’ for such an ambiguous compliment. And even the pale gentleman depicted reminds them all tantalizingly of ‘some face in our party’ (p. 46), a puzzle soon solved which confirms the narrator’s own hunch, but it is a likeness not recognized by his female companion. The company regroups, the narrator and the painter begin to talk with ‘the others being out of earshot’ (p. 47), the narrative realigning itself for the next sequence of observations. The picture serves as a gathering point for hermeneutic speculation, though it is only one of several occasions when the narrative succumbs to a multiplicity of associated perspectives and judgments. The mix of possibilities seems inexhaustible as different options are introduced. The distinctive readings can be contradictory: is the mask male or female, is it the living face or the facsimile that is condemned or blessed by mortality? In this dramatization of the subjective which refuses to reach conclusion or endorse one authority rather than another, the most remote and inaccessible yet data-rich source of information is the picture – but this seems only to generate questions. Indeed its content dramatizes the simplest operation of human interchange, the public and the private, appearance and truth, and the shifting ground to be negotiated between appar-

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ent polarities. Yet the human spectators who are sharing this weekend occupy an equally arcane and symmetrical pattern of being, tied up with questions both trivial and urgent, spying and spied upon in an evolving and artificial set of circumstances, the world of the fiction. Pictures and the observing of pictures recur, of course, frequently in James’s fiction from his earliest days, many of them demanding to be related to the human circumstances of the narrative.2 However the scene with ‘The Man in the Mask’ at its centre raises much more complex questions on the nature of subjective experience, on reading the multiple messages of an art object, or the unfolding pattern of changing human relations and their need of interpretation. It signals a moment of ambiguity and contradictoriness, a warning against the straightforward or commonsensical, a reminder of the significance of silence, of meaning contained in indirection. If James represents the painting and its group of human commentators as a drama of the ironies or dangers of interpretive overconfidence, the episode can serve, however loosely, as a cautionary example of the hazards of interpretation. The scene exemplifies the power of impressions, the hesitations and duplicities which can influence the reading of a situation, the values which characterize the representational. They are terms and conditions frequently invoked or enacted by James himself in his twentieth-century writing, and it is, in a much fuller and more diverse context, this construction of experience and the means of its recording that I shall examine in Writing the Self: Henry James and America. The emblematic episode above raises, of course, the possibility of dangers and multiplying ramifications, but my argument addresses the last dozen years of the novelist’s life in the light of probably the most significant event of that period – his extended return to America, his attempt to assimilate this new world, the destabilizing impact of the adventure, and the revised and liberated self which was to find a characteristic voice in both the autobiographical writing as well as the fiction. It has been said that the celebrated Prefaces for the twenty-four-volume New York Edition (1907–9) of his works constitute, as well as the most critically sophisticated critique of the novel, a form of autobiography of James’s revisionary self.3 The preparation of the edition occupied him for over two years and, aside from its personal significance, added James to a series of celebrated authors of the time who published de luxe editions of their works. Whatever the aesthetic achievement, the public gesture foundered: the edition was largely and humiliatingly ignored. The autobiographical impulse is frequently extrapolated from the discursive allusions and tropes of the Prefaces: in Writing the Self I have attempted to locate James’s assembling of his American self in the text of The American Scene, his complex record of return to his homeland and confrontation with both its known and unfamiliar landscapes. The psycho-emotional experience narrated in that journey was profound, a form of initiation noted,

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even in the years immediately after James’s death, as shocking. Percy Lubbock, in his 1920 edition of the novelist’s letters, refers to this ‘voyage of new discovery’ as ‘the adventure’, ‘the daily assault of sensation’, the gathering of ‘a vast mass of strange material’, and (echoing his subject) the exercise of an ‘unbroken rage of interest’.4 For a later generation Leon Edel characterized the late works as belonging to the novelist’s ‘“American years”, more American even than the years of his lost youth’.5 In a surprising statement in The American Scene, the volume which documents his return, James suggests (and he had just witnessed some disturbing scenes of immigration on Ellis Island) that ‘one’s supreme relation, as one had always put it, was one’s relation to one’s country’ (AS, p. 85). There is no doubt that in his reading of nation, mysterious or undecipherable as its messages might be, and destabilized by the aggressive effects of twentieth-century industrialism, James went on to develop a discursive mode which acknowledges, most crucially, the erotic potential of the anonymous, the oblivious crowd, the ‘adventure’ of the street or chance liaison. The subsequent writing, both fictional and autobiographical, develops the self-revelatory insights and idioms of The American Scene (which could also be regarded as a history of The American Self 6) and assumes a new perspective whereby men become fluent in their reading of each other and narrative stretches the boundaries of gender-defined behaviours. Amongst the works I discuss which are ‘intimately related to his American self ’ (Life, vol. II, p. 621) are two of the last great short stories, ‘The Jolly Corner’ and ‘A Round of Visits’; the two complete volumes of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother; the incomplete novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past; and, for the light they throw upon the centrality of the Civil War in James’s construction of history, some of his earliest published work, the three short stories ‘The Story of a Year’, ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’ and ‘Poor Richard’. In the summer of 1910 James accompanied his older brother William home to die – ‘a bitter pilgrimage … from far off ’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 561), but it was his earlier trip of 1904–5 which exerted the most profound influence on his writing, causing him to reconfigure his relations with the country he had not visited for over twenty years, appraise his sense of family and consider, a little ruefully, his own condition as ‘repentant absentee’ (AS, p. 2). He self-deprecatingly aligns himself with Lambert Strether, the ‘poor old hero’ of The Ambassadors, to whom he acknowledges a ‘vague resemblance’,7 but the destabilizing shock caused by America, the psychic and emotional repercussions which ensued, and the assimilation of the experience denote a stamina absent from Strether’s conviction of his ‘meagreness’, that he has ‘lived’ as much as he can, with little greater sense of identity than that provided by seeing his name discreetly in print on the cover of the Woollett journal he edits and which Mrs Newsome finances.8 If James

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begins revising himself in relation to this new-found and shocking continent, it seems too that in the concussive experience of seeing familiar old places, witnessing the disintegration of other identity-confirming sites, and seeing afresh locations associated with the history of the nation in which he had little part, he also ‘rights’ himself in a process which is definably present in his writing. ‘America’ signifies more complicated insights, too, as my chapters on The American Scene will illustrate. The 1904–5 visit produced a series of essays which, in their portrayal of threatened identity, of the questioning of autobiographical method, of fearful recognition of people and events from a distant past, of self-abandonment to anonymous encounters and pleasurable liaisons, of the silences produced by ethnic distance and difference, of aesthetic conviction that demands that language should not conspire to mask disparities, bear little relation to the genre of travel-writing, even as defined by James’s own volumes on France, England and Italy. If James interrogates the issues of nation, transformed over the previous twenty years and reflective of his own psychic and sexual unease, he also raises the technical challenges of ‘notation’, of accurately interpreting the signs of a continent which seems frighteningly limitless in its possibilities. James’s American scene includes the city of his birth, New York, now the site of the nation’s most aggressive expression of modernity and dedication to business and everything provisional, a place which reduces him at times to abject and erotically-charged submission. Setting no store by individual privacy, it has destroyed the locations of his childhood and he experiences a comparable sense of mutilation on returning to Boston, the scene of his early manhood. The places of New England, Cambridge on a September night with its ‘old distinctively American earth-smell’ (AS, p. 56), and Newport, its historic, figuratively spinsterish character transformed by the ostentatious grandeur of mansions financed by business profits, clapboard country villages representing a modified Arcadia, are peopled by the memories of ‘ghostly’ presences. As James moves south through Washington, Richmond, Charleston, as far as Florida, he is confronted by the symbols of national history and its one most decisive event, the Civil War, commemorated in some of his earliest fiction and returned to in his late autobiography. James returned to America despite the fears of William and of his Cambridge friend Grace Norton that he would find it impossibly vulgar, and for reasons beyond a need to make money from lecturing or writing travel impressions. As early as 1902 he had written nostalgically to his old friend Sara Wister who lived in Philadelphia as he listened to the ticking of the clock bequeathed to him by her mother, also a friend, the actor and writer Fanny Kemble: I echo without the least reserve your declaration (from Aiken, S.C.) that I ought to come home again before the ‘romance’ of Charleston and the like completely departs. My feeling is with you absolutely on the subject; all my sensibility vibrates to the truth

6

Writing the Self: Henry James and America you utter. Vous préchez, in fine, un converti: 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 (HJL, vol. IV, p. 259).

In an evolution which, he admits, ‘takes some explaining’, America has now become what Europe had earlier been for the ‘yearning young’ – his indirect way of referring to himself. As he travels south towards Virginia, he anticipates the initiation once provided by the ‘European oracle’; he will be introduced to ‘Romance and mystery – in other words the amusement of interest’ and, perhaps, some revised version of his youth. America has become a world ‘amended and enriched’, ‘reviving curiosity’ and stretching a ‘limp imagination’. In an anticipation of Nick Carraway’s concluding words in The Great Gatsby he admits, in observing a ‘perfect iridescence of fresh aspects’, that it appeals ‘more and more … to the faculty of wonder’ (AS, pp. 365–6). His enthusiasm is for the unfamiliar, ‘the actual bristling … USA’, less for the America of his past, the land of ‘our multiplied memories’, principally New York and Boston, but for the unknown; he wants to ‘see everything’ of the ‘Middle and Far West and California and the South’. He may have found it ‘almost utterly charmless’, yet paradoxically he regards the place as ‘an extraordinary world, an altogether huge “proposition”, as they say there’ (JF, pp. 310–13). The newly-returned ‘palpitating pilgrim’ experiences the conviction as a physical actuality, ‘like the rifle of a keen sportsman, carried across his shoulder and ready for instant use’ (AS, p. 366). Like the hero of his unfinished novel The Ivory Tower, he will associate America with its abundant food – ‘squash-pie and ice cream in heroic proportions’ – and boundless landscapes, the ‘dear old American, or particularly New England, scenery. It comes back to me as with such a magnificent beckoning looseness’ (JF, p. 314). James, a flâneur since his earliest, unsupervised days wandering through New York and revelling in the ‘riot or revel … of the visiting mind’ – ‘just to be somewhere’ (Aut, pp. 16–17), continues to find ‘adventure’ in the anonymity of the city streets.9 In an access of excitement, he ‘vibrates’ and surrenders himself to the moment, as his language emphasizes, suggesting a mood of sexual nonconformity and dissidence. His susceptibility to ‘impressions’, acknowledged from the beginning of The American Scene, takes on erotic potential, a heightened sensitivity, a state of aroused expectation: he returns ‘with much of the freshness of eye, outward and inward, which, with the further contribution of a state of desire, is commonly held a precious agent of perception’ (AS, ‘Preface’, n.p.). The ‘adventures’ of the ‘rioting mind’ can be initiated in the street, in the promiscuous crowd and his assimilation within it. James’s language is full of latitude, and within that breadth his own role shifts and adjusts, inviting the range of interpretation illustrated in the mask scene of The Sacred Fount. The psychologist Jerome Bruner, in his theorizing of selfhood, has suggested that ‘Self-making

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through self-narrating is restless and endless … It is a dialectical process, a balancing act.’10 Quite distinct from its designation as cultural critique, The American Scene constructs a figure who emerges within a series of defined moments, just as the characters who people James’s specifically autobiographical writing carry no essentialist reference, but stand as ‘a product of our telling’.11 The achieving of ‘our personal identities’ is accomplished by the use of what Donald E. Polkinghorne calls ‘narrative configuration’, and thus James’s text can be understood as a document in ‘a single unfolding and developing story’, containing ‘not only what one has been’, but also anticipating ‘what one will be’. Indeed, this notion of the self as something constructed rather than an ‘underlying substance to be discovered’, derives, as Polkinghorne indicates, from William James, who proposed in The Principles of Psychology the categories of the ‘material’, ‘social’ and ‘spiritual’ as constituents of the whole self.12 The American Scene records the continuing accumulation of material in the configuration of self as the most impressionable and painstaking of observers confronts a continent both known and mysterious. It is a landscape of fearsome incompletion and absence of boundary, which holds incomprehensible messages challenging James, as the text records, to find expedients in writing the self, what William James referred to as that ‘Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings’ which constitutes ‘the real and verifiable “personal identity” which we feel’.13 The volumes of formal autobiography had their beginnings in a family-centred enterprise, a consequence in part of his second return to America in 1910 when William, his last surviving sibling, died. The plan to write a ‘Family Book’ based on his brother’s letters was lost sight of as James became engrossed in his own childhood. The volume titles, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, imply a deferential, self-effacing role in relation to his own life-writing, though in practice his complete control over the available documentary material (principally letters) marks a temperament which can never escape the revisionary impulse. Even as a child he is both observer and the observed; in a Hogarthian London street scene where Henry and William are stared at for bearing the ‘alien stamp’ of their ‘plumage’ (Aut, p. 174), the conviction of not belonging is inescapable. A different enactment of shame occurs when he stumbles across adult tragedy: overhearing the grief of an aunt separated from her dying husband from whom she has herself contracted tuberculosis, he retreats ‘scared and hushed’ (Aut, p. 105) by the experience. In this theatre of separateness, even potential humiliation, where he did so much ‘wondering and dawdling and gaping’ (Aut, p. 17), James traces the earliest events of his life, set in a provincial antebellum New York or in a Europe of Dickensian or Thackerayan vividness, moving forward to a young manhood which coincided with the outbreak of Civil War in 1861.

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The enduring embodiment of that event for James is the sunburnt Union soldier, modelled on the young men he had desired and who absorb his attention in some of the earliest short stories. By 1904 he had developed a language and an idiom for the expression of male–male subjectivity, a style which seems to prevaricate coyly between discretion and daring revelation in its consideration of the male and the masculine and of what the relations between men might consist in. James’s London years in the 1880s and 1890s doubtless helped reconfigure attitudes and terms. Michel Foucault’s contention that this was the era when ‘the nineteenthcentury homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology’14 has now become a familiar landmark of cultural history. Events in late-Victorian London, the Cleveland Street brothel scandal and the Oscar Wilde trials in the last decade of the century, publicized modes of behaviour demonized by the press as a threat to heterodoxy, as well as prompting draconian amendments to the law. But they also defined and elaborated new terms, variably expressive, within the public sphere. At the end of the nineteenth century, according to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘new institutionalized taxonomic discourses – medical, legal, literary, psychological – centering on homo/heterosexual definition proliferated and crystallized with exceptional rapidity’.15 James’s equivocal (at best) attitude to Wilde, his admiration for the writing of John Addington Symonds, and his friendships with Edmund Gosse, A. C. Benson and Howard Sturgis, amongst others, represent various configurations of homosexual experience within a professional writing milieu in a period when ‘codes of sexuality are being induced and/or imposed’.16 It is a time, therefore, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, in discussing John Marcher in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, when James accedes to ‘homosexual possibility’, ‘whether as a homosexual man or as a man with a less exclusively defined sexuality that nevertheless admits the possibility of desires for other men’.17 A note made as early as July 1891, when James was staying in Ireland and recovering from influenza, records a moment of personal insight and resolution as he reviews and anticipates the continuing features of his ‘personal’ as well as ‘artistic life’ (CN, p. 58). In its expansiveness and poignant reassuring of the self it foreshadows Strether’s advice to little Bilham in The Ambassadors to ‘“live all you can”’; he foresees that he might still ‘touch’ upon ‘many subjects, break out in many places, handle so many of the threads of life’: The upshot of all such reflections is that I have only to let myself go! So I have said to myself all my life – so I said to myself in the far-off days of my fermenting and passionate youth. Yet I have never fully done it. The sense of it – of the need of it – rolls over me at times with commanding force: 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

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more – than I have done. The way to do it – to affirm one’s self sur la fin – 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. 57–8).

In this anticipation of what he sees professionally as his late spell of unexpectedly fine weather (he was only just forty-eight at the time) he will doubtless meet with ‘doubts and discouragements’, though even these (and he touches on a sensation prevalent in The American Scene) will be ‘only so many essential vibrations of one’s ideal’, a bodily registering of facets of the process of creation, a physical trope typical of James’s recording of the sensuousness of creation and writing. Yet ahead of him lay difficulties: in the final twenty-odd years of his life James suffered from debilitating bouts of mental and physical ill-health, a period summarized by a fairly recent biographer, Lyndall Gordon, thus: ‘From a depression in 1893 to a breakdown in 1910–12 – from the age of fifty to sixty-nine – James was haunted by incompletion. His last three novels, great as they are, did not quiet his angst. There was the Master of the novel, and there was the other – a man in the making, uncertain who he was in the end to be.’18 Though some of these terms are loose (most unhelpfully, ‘angst’), the general summary is suggestive. Aside from the theatrical disappointments of the 1890s, he had been in close attendance at the death from breast cancer of his sister Alice in March 1892. His friend Constance Fenimore Woolson died suicidally in Venice in 1894. Much later, William’s death in 1910 had been felt as ‘an absolute mutilation’ (Life, vol. II, p. 725). These, most briefly, are the chief external causes of sadness in James’s personal life. Despite its poor sales (and a continuing failure of his work to gain a wider readership), the New York Edition nevertheless marked, in terms of the texts achieved and the critical and aesthetic rationale disclosed, a form of completion as satisfactory as could be expected in one so addicted to revision. The separation of the familiar but caricatured designation of James as ‘Master’ from some ‘other’, incomplete, questing self, though it makes for a certain biographical tension, creates an unreal division. It is James’s great strength and a route to the freedoms evident in his twentieth-century writing that he remains open to uncertainty and willing to express vulnerability – characteristics illustrated in the admissions of incompletion in The American Scene and projected in the lives of the young men of his latest fiction.19 In other respects, if he has ‘let himself go’ as he had encouraged himself to do, there is strong evidence to suggest that James was little more ‘haunted by incompletion’ than anyone with a reflective capacity. The late retrospective writing of the autobiographies recounts from early on the detachment of what he would later call ‘that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, and inexhaustible sensibility’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 706). As F. W. Dupee points out in the introduction to his edition

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of James’s autobiographical volumes, from the beginning ‘he refined his gaping habit into a form of creative vision, thus liberating himself from the more paralyzing effects of his estrangement, his “otherness”’ (Aut, p. xii). Reflecting in older age on his childhood, he detects in the appearance of both William and himself on the streets of London an ‘alien stamp’, their ‘very plumage’ in contrast with the ‘grey street-scenery’ (Aut, pp. 174, 170) observed as setting them apart in their foreignness. That youthful sense of difference persisted throughout life. Of the series of friendships James enjoyed with younger men which become particularly prominent from the turn of the century, the most significant is perhaps his passion for the Norwegian-American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen, whom he met in his Roman studio in 1899. Leon Edel has suggested that James saw in Andersen ‘an inward vision of his own youth’: ‘he looked into the mirror and saw smiling and healthy youth instead of his obese and ageing self ’ (Life, vol. II, pp. 327, 328), a point developed as a formulation for the novelist’s narcissistic sexuality by John R. Bradley in Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence.20 The sculptor had the grandest aspirations21 and much of his work failed to appeal to James; he did, however, buy something more modest at the end of this meeting, a small bust of ‘Berto’, the fatherless aristocratic boy, Count Alberto Bevilacqua Lazise, who had befriended the sculptor, which he kept in Rye House.22 In his first letter to Andersen, James regards the piece as ‘a loved companion and friend’ and foresees that ‘it will be a lifelong attachment. Brave little Bevilacqua and braver still big Maestro Andersen!’ (HJL, vol. IV, pp. 108–9). The sculpture becomes a decorous intermediary for James’s affection. The young count, a life-size, rather solid bust, bears no relation to the epic, thrusting male and female nudes which would continue to characterize Andersen’s output, nor to his epic plans for a utopian world city. More importantly, though, the figure of the modest young male in his fragility and vulnerability will become a living object of desire in James’s last pieces of fiction, cherished and gazed upon by other men, possessing what can be a tragic innocence of heart. James wrote to his old friend Thomas Sergeant Perry, whom he had known since youth, that he (now that William is dead) has become the ‘ideal reader’ of his Notes of a Son and Brother. Perry was a New England contemporary who had ended his career occupying a Harvard chair, and James addresses him as ‘its intelligent reader of all readers’, ‘the only person alive who could understand what I meant there, and that though others might think they did it wouldn’t be so true of any of them as of you’.23 The idea is repeated later in 1914 to Margaret La Farge (the wife of the painter John La Farge, and Perry’s sister): ‘That I have made the unspeakable Past live again a little for you is delightful to me … There are passages and pages in the book which Tom and you are the sole persons living who will have understood.’24 As for how we read James in the twenty-first century in a world which has long been post-Freudian, in which sexual behaviours are enacted in the shadow of a succession of liberations, and gender identity is to be interpreted

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within a cultural continuum, the question is more complex. That scene from The Sacred Fount offers a fictive consideration of the ramifications of reading identity and, indeed, two impressions of James in life convey, in different ways, the ambiguities of appearance. His last amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, reports that James had been likened to a sea-captain, but concludes that ‘no successful naval officer could have afforded to keep that sensitive mobile mouth’.25 In a more private context she records a comic and domestic moment of gender transformation at a Christmas party: ‘Mr. James’s most successful mask was 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?”’26 William James had, years earlier, characterized his brother during his London life in an exotic, self-created guise, as something superficially monstrous, an assemblage of exterior manners designed to obscure what he fondly saw as the simpler reality within: ‘Harry is as nice and simple and amiable as he can be. He has covered himself, like some marine crustacean, with all sorts of material growths, rich sea-weeds and rigid barnacles and things, and lives hidden in the midst of his strange heavy alien manners and customs; but these are all but “protective resemblances”, under which the same dear old, good, innocent and at bottom very powerless-feeling Harry remains, caring for little but his writing, and full of dutifulness and affection for all gentle things.’27 Aside from such anecdotal though revealing material, James’s works, with their range of reference in twentieth-century America, seem increasingly and profoundly to challenge conventional gender norms of behaviour. In the directly autobiographical writing and quasi-autobiographical modes such as The American Scene, James develops a discourse in which he, as the incorrigible seeker after impressions, is subjected to landscapes and urban scenes which reduce him to abject passivity by means of their intimidating and progressive modernity. Through a series of tropes and miniature dramas James formulates his own pleasurable, if unnerving, submission to forces and rhythms stronger than himself, as if the protagonists of the city (inanimate as well as living) were an embodiment of varied but unswerving masculinity, akin to that more concentrated but sinister force of the ‘other’ in ‘The Jolly Corner’. He surrenders to the young male commuters, with their visions of a future constructed on commerce and industry, and to the jostling anonymous crowds which issue from their workplaces. If these occasions of private pleasure represent an eroticized assimilation of modern American urban life, the flâneur records, too, opportunities to meet individual young men and to establish a freelyacknowledged subjectivity of homosocial warmth which values openness and an accessibility to the engaging messages to be exchanged. The scenes of corporate military life and individual portraits of beloved young men from the middle years of the nineteenth century which help document James’s writing of self in the Autobiography derive their range and terms from this earlier discourse which has

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Writing the Self: Henry James and America

developed a medium for the expression of male affection. He recalls in A Small Boy and Others his youthful absence of jealousy of other ‘happier persons’, attributing it to a ‘lack of spirit’ and his supposition that they enjoyed ‘a certain sort of richer consciousness’. He appoints himself in this analytical mode as an abject and irrevocably separate observer: ‘They 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; unattainable, impossible, of course …’ (Aut, p. 101). This sensuous apprehension of the strangeness of others presents a viable location for the emotional and erotic charge of James’s admiration for these young men. Some of the episodes from James’s latest fiction, stories which include ‘The Jolly Corner’ and ‘A Round of Visits’, as well as the two unfinished novels, which are set in an identifiable America or involve American heroes, continue to extend the available behaviours denoting sexuality or gender. It is as if, in disengaging from elements of European decadence with its morbid privileging of the individual experience, thus posing, in Paul Bourget’s view, a threat of ‘anarchy’,28 James finds himself free geographically (or, in terms of The Sense of the Past, historically) to conceive of interaction between males of homosocial intensity. In such intimacy the face may be gazed upon, physical contact denoting affection made, seductive flattery exchanged, transgenerational bonds established in a repertoire of activity which itself erodes gender-based boundaries. The looks and touches exchanged between men imply a private testing of customary boundaries in a performance which amends or revises ideas of gender or at least cultural masculinity. In this context it is helpful to recall Judith Butler who, pursuing Simone de Beauvoir’s contention that ‘gender is “constructed”’, suggests that it may be both ‘variable and volitional’, subject to continued interpretation ‘by cultural meanings’.29 The kinds of rapport which James imagines sometimes enter more arcane regions, signified by a camp excess of language and tone, which subject the conventions attaching to gender identity to even greater and more elaborate challenge, perhaps to see how ‘queer’ (in the sense of ‘at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant’30) folk may be. At these times James seems to test the criteria of masculinity, to query ‘the complex social structures that wed masculinity to maleness and to power and domination’,31 and to propose alternatives or inflections of gender performance. For all his European travel in childhood, James’s adolescence and young manhood were located on the American eastern seaboard, thus making it an appropriate location for his late exploration of male subjectivity. New York City with its opportunities for the flâneur celebrated by James, for its threatening of privacy and eroticizing of secret meeting places, for its socially anonymous promiscuity and engulfing force, stands in contrast with the tranquillity and wealth of Newport, its opulence and cleanliness, a location from which an American future can be

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imagined. They form two of the sites for James’s latest and perhaps most romantic considerations of male experience. John R. Bradley regards the novelist in his ‘permanent adolescence’ as ‘the type of homosexual Freud characterised as introspective, focussed on adolescent boys and young men, and on his own adolescence and early manhood, in an attempt to recapture the lost sense of a real, defining self first encountered during sexual awakening’. In this depiction of James’s homoerotic narcissism, Bradley refers us to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and her discussion of that other great labour of retrospection, the New York Edition and its Prefaces. The critical voice she hears is in relationship, ‘intersubjective’ and ‘intergenerational’ with his younger self, though with no desire (or nostalgia perhaps) to become again that earlier figure; indeed, ‘the very distance of these inner self-figurations from the speaking self of the present is marked, treasured, and in fact eroticized’.32 James imagined his 1904–5 return (however impossibly) as a physical retrieval of boyhood, longing for some rural American idyll in which he (with a faint echo of Roderick Hudson) might participate: ‘I think with a great appetite in advance, of the chance, once more, to lie on the ground, on an American hillside, on the edge of the woods, in the manner of my youth’ (Life, vol. II, p. 546). James returned, significantly, to America for the title of that great critical and creative enterprise, the new edition of his novels and stories. The short and partially completed fiction of the same period is a further re-enactment of national identity predicated upon that private self which speaks in these final works through the conversations and mutual affections of young men. Earlier in his career James had offered a gender-inflected interpretation of one of the critics upon whom he modelled himself, Sainte-Beuve, suggesting that in his Correspondance ‘there is something feminine in his tact, his penetration, his subtlety and pliability, his rapidity of transition, his magical divinations, his sympathies and antipathies, his marvelous art of insinuation, of expressing himself by fine touches and of adding touch to touch’, whilst acknowledging ‘faculties of the masculine stamp, the solid sense, the constant reason, the moderation, the copious knowledge, the passion for exactitude and for general considerations’.33 Having established such gender-based features of aesthetic sensibility in which the ‘masculine’ controls and the ‘feminine’ is typified as sustaining the fullest range of subjective insight, James ensures that his fictional young men, with their ‘tact, penetration, subtlety’, are placed in situations which demand, or benefit from modified constructions of masculinity. Such alternatives, present from the beginning of James’s career (in, for example, Rowland Mallet’s role in Roderick Hudson), are now enacted with little recourse to subterfuge or coded terms, as they are released into a more feminized and congenial twentieth-century existence.

2 SURRENDERING TO THE MESSAGES OF NEW YORK

The impressions which assailed Henry James on arrival in New York at the end of August 1904 proved overwhelming for a variety of reasons relating to his psychic equanimity, to unresolved or sublimated questions of sexuality, to values inherited through family, even to the tools of his vocation – the capacity to read and write and to control language. The city which awaited the novelist and which would so deeply disturb him could not have been more different from the New York remembered from childhood which emerges from the pages of A Small Boy and Others, a consciously pastoral-arcadian construction set in the 1840s and 50s. At its broadest and most intellectually accessible the New York experience raised the question of America and what it had come to mean for the novelist – its racial, ethnic, linguistic composition.1 The city’s strident dedication to commerce and business was regarded with the horror of a man whose father had conscientiously disavowed having any profession at all – commercial or otherwise: ‘business in a world of business was the thing we most agreed … in knowing nothing about’ (Aut, p. 35).2 Perhaps more intimately threatening was the unashamed embracing of the provisional, the dismissal of ‘association’ as either a public or personal value and the assumption of a gregariousness without regard for privacy. Yet in the perceived mass of engulfing humanity and the excess of impressions which actively came upon him, James’s sexual identity is signalled in a language which indicates pleasurable, sensation-filled submission, a condition of surrender and being possessed. James’s evaluation of his creative and critical self is consistently explored in a language which in its veiled, suggestive register invokes a definable sexual identity which seems keen to struggle free of providing merely figurative or illustrative weight. The waterfront of New York, that ‘miscellaneous monster’ (AS, p. 50), lit by a September sun reminds him of some exotic Mediterranean port – Naples, Tangiers or Constantinople – and a sense of the illicit prompts him to anticipate the ‘still finer throb’ (AS, p. 3) as his critical faculty contemplates what the city may bravely ‘flaunt’, before beginning defiantly to ‘drape itself ’ in protective inconsistencies. James, having just crossed the Atlantic, carries his – 14 –

Surrendering to the Messages of New York

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own interior preparedeness – ‘a kind of fluidity of appreciation – a mild, warm wave that broke over the succession of aspects and objects according to some odd inward rhythm’. Having ‘floated’ him for a couple of days, it is ‘tenderly’ recalled, having allowed him ‘up into the subject’. But however seductive its sensory appeal, New York (moving into James’s other allusive theme) is only partly legible: he feels it ‘like the spelling-out of foreign sentences of which one knows but half the words’. And even what he finds of the paradoxically ‘old New York’ with its ‘sweet’, ‘vague’ reminders and its ‘yellower’ light may set traps for the indulgence of memory; it is relentlessly ‘circumscribed’, with little ‘more emphasis than so many tail-pieces of closed chapters’ (AS, pp. 4–5). It is an insecure and shifting medium: even bricks and mortar will fall victim to demolition. In a deliberate strategy which allows inconclusiveness, fragmentation and marginality to become an influential feature of his discourse, James makes a virtue of partially-assimilated impression beyond merely rhetorical gesture. In thus characterizing himself as an all-too belaboured ‘analyst’ he introduces some of the conventions by which he is to be read as well as alerting his reader to the near-impossibility of his subject. Even these admissions, which point to confusion and making-do, continue to insist on making allowances for nuance and exceptions, for those lucky moments of insight grasped opportunely: the ‘white towers, all new and wide and commercial and over-windowed as they are’, can offer a momentary ‘message for the eyes’, and appear with ‘fleeting distinction’. The shaping aesthetic eye must catch such occasions – in drizzle and fog hanging about ‘the flanks and summits of emergent mountain-masses’, and thus working ‘wonders’, or, in the ‘lights and shades of winter and summer air, of the literally “finishing” afternoon in particular, when refinement of modelling descends from the skies’ (AS, p. 81). Thus relegated as art-objects, externally viewed and devoid of human life, these symbols of modernity and commerce can be redeemed, apprehended and assimilated, accessible to a sensibility refined over the years. When this refining, beautifying, ephemerally mood-inducing distance is lost (and with it a framework for aesthetic contemplation), when he sees a building ‘from the inside’ and is thus granted a ‘vision of their prodigious working’, he has revealed to him, ‘overwhelmingly’, ‘the character of New York’. It is a compulsive vision, ‘an opportunity I sought again, repeatedly, in respect to others’. The discourse allows James to escape into self-protective oddity as this self-confessed ‘incurable eccentric’ is reminded not to ‘let himself go’, however deep his ‘passion’ for ‘the extraction of character’. Yet his wondering language, with its appreciation of enormity and stricture, connotes a sublimated yearning for closeness of contact, for physical consummation within a remorselessly pulsating rhythm contained by each tall building, ‘huge constructed and compressed communities, throbbing, through its myriad arteries and pores, with a single passion, even as a complicated watch throbs with the one purpose of telling you the hour

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Writing the Self: Henry James and America

and the minute’. Even within the bounds of self-restraint against such orgasmic potential, the experience overmasters him, ‘overflowing the cup and spreading in a wide waste of speculation’ (AS, p. 82). The pursuit of business, its national endorsement and, in the symbolism of the James family, its expression of masculinity, amalgamates in the New York streets to compel James into a welter of humanity which robs him of volition and thrusts him into enforced, formless intimacy with corporate maleness, allowing a condition of camp fantasy to be acted out in this scene of simultaneous degradation (the moment of promiscuous sexual abandonment quite at odds with the socially-determined expressed need for privacy he elsewhere exhorts). ‘The weather’, ‘“the state of the streets”’, the ‘assault of the turbid air’ establish the cherished associations of this moment of desired 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’ (AS, p. 83). In this self-inflicted immersion, orthodoxy is jettisoned, and ‘relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights’. He is helplessly assimilated, in a form of nostalgie de la boue (he refers, more mundanely, to ‘the muddy medium’), into an impersonal, unrelenting rhythm, ‘the universal will to move – to move, move, move, as an end in itself, as appetite at any price’ (AS, p. 84).3 Absorbed within the anonymity of the crowd and its containing building, and indeed in its annexation of his critical self, James seems reduced to submission, to the recording of incidental subjective response, such is the ‘immense momentum’ of the ‘monstrous phenomena’ of these ‘reflecting surfaces’ which evade ‘any possibility of poetic, of dramatic capture’ (AS, p. 83). Only perhaps an affectionately remembered novelist of his much earlier Parisian days, ‘poor great wonder-working Émile Zola’ (AS, p. 82), with his ‘energy of creation’, might have ‘meddled’ with such phenomena. In this romantic oneness with the unknown stranger, deep and fleeting, the voice of Walt Whitman can be heard, as if James finds at such American moments some homoerotic continuity based on the idea and ideal of democracy, a male intimacy unavailable to his European self: ‘Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you, / You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking (it comes to me as of a dream,) …’.4 If New York threatens aesthetically and emotionally in so many penetrating ways, James’s accumulated sense of self and familiar values reinforcing an identity, this temporary but arousing assimilation operating at a psychosexual level can be regarded, in the light of the fiction still to be written, as reassuringly (if dangerously) liberating, as querying the constraining rules by which he had conducted much of his life. These moments of privately registered, unnoticed integration (however animated the analyst’s language) are not dissimilar, in their emphatic acknowledgments, to the occasions of fearful bewilderment at the enormity of the

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scene before him. The ‘voice of the morning’ (AS, p. 74) embraces ferries, tugs, whistles, waves and winds to gather ‘the bigness and bravery and insolence … of everything that rushed and shrieked’ (AS, p. 75). It is summed up as ‘energy’, ‘the bold lacing-together, across the waters, of the scattered members of the monstrous organism – lacing as by the ceaseless play of an enormous system of steam-shuttles or electric bobbins’. The horror he feels at the power of the scene and the monstrosity of ‘some steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws’ is expressed in an idiom which has its origins in the post-Romantic critique of industrial England narrated in Gaskell and Dickens. Yet James’s disturbance transcends any literary-historical nostalgia; his vision of trolley cars, their menacing rails and cables, invokes a classical sculpture entailing death by constriction. Social relations are reduced to survival within the constraints of winter in his vision of ‘the endless electric coil, the monstrous chain that winds round the general neck and body, the general middle and legs, very much as the boa-constrictor winds round the group of the Laocoon’ (AS, p. 89), a trope derived from the Vatican sculpture depicting the Trojan Laocoön and his sons, wrapped round by sea monsters in a writhing moment of horror. New York acted, however, to destabilize James at a deeper level. Like Fanny Kemble, who generations earlier (in the 1830s) had been surprised ‘in this land of contemptuous youth’,5 he is shocked at the rows of houses ‘with their handsome faces so fresh and yet so wan and so anxious’ (AS, p. 158) marked for demolition, and likens them to the ‘youths and maidens’ born into the French Revolution to become its innocent victims. The potential data for history has in this culture become expendable. As we shall see, houses in late James can become animated, sentient, speaking entities, often with a conscience lacking in humankind, part of a rhetorical scheme. Yet these observed houses embody the city’s desperation – the chronic beating of the wings of ‘pecuniary power’, an expression of ‘individual loneliness’ and its ‘insistent testimony to waste’ (AS, p. 159). The luxury houses of the New Jersey shoreline take on the abstract form of ‘the expensive’, a formulation which James presents as an aspect of America’s unpredictable and mysterious future – as lethal and unstoppable as ‘a train covering ground at maximum speed and pushing on, at present, into regions unmeasurable’ (AS, p. 9). This is ‘a power by itself, a power unguided, undirected, practically unapplied’, against which ‘the question of manners’ can offer no defence. The cultural antithesis is elaborately imagined in a figurative, Edwardian opulence, indicating other values aside from ‘the expensive’ which will determine American life, ‘other lights, some of which glimmered, to my eyes, as with the promise of great future intensity – hanging themselves as directly over the question of manners as if they had been a row of lustres reflected in the polished floor of

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Writing the Self: Henry James and America

a ball-room’. These villas embody for James (as with the Waldorf-Astoria hotel later) the lack of any ‘constituted mystery of retreat’; the ‘projection’ is entirely ‘outward’, the ‘basis of privacy wanting’, so that what the future holds ‘as a doom from which there could be no appeal’ amounts simply to ‘unmitigated publicity’ (AS, p. 10) (another ‘value’ promoted at the Waldorf-Astoria). This is his vision of society’s future extrapolated from ‘a foot of garden wall’, a ‘stretch of interposing shade’ – houses expressing the maximum amount of money spent whilst freely admitting they are ‘“only instalments, symbols, stop-gaps”’ (AS, p. 11). Whatever the pathos and cruelty of history, it is the American home, with its ‘multiplied apertures’, that fills James with dread at its ideal of making public all aspects of the lives led within. In this law of construction ‘every part of every house shall be, as nearly as may be, visible, penetrable, not only from every other part, but from as many parts of as many other houses as possible, if they only be near enough’ (AS, p. 167). The demolition of the James family home and the development of the area in Washington Square has the disturbing, unnatural shock of amputation, and the subsequent autobiographical writing can be regarded as acquiring a prosthetic value in reconstituting the days of his childhood and of the city in its antebellum, provincial picturesqueness. It is the square which had once contained, in that early and retrospective novel Washington Square, ‘a kind of established repose’, with its ‘rural and accessible appearance’, ‘the look of having had something of a social history’.6 In this mutilation he has lost half his history: the loss extends beyond the personal and represents the values of nation which in James’s dialectic attach no meaning to ‘association’ or the preservation of tradition. Under threat, as Alan Trachtenberg suggests, is his understanding of ‘the integrity of time and the wholeness of self ’.7 A wonderfully imagined voice representing the spirit of relentless progress explains triumphantly and complacently how it is done: ‘Fortunately we’ve learned the secret for keeping association at bay. We’ve learned that the great thing is not to suffer it to so much as begin’ (AS, p. 112). Some of James’s later protagonists will secrete themselves in darkened houses, mounting and descending their staircases, standing in doorways, in search of their other selves, or silently pondering their identity, so it is fitting that the houses of New York should horrify him in their strident denial of privacy. With their ‘multiplied apertures’ they not only fail to offer psychic refuge, they collude with a potentially curious world in presenting the individual as a specimen, to be served up ‘for convenient inspection, under a clear glass cover’. James’s anxiety extends far beyond the social dimensions he claims as suffering through lack of a defining context, ‘that “good” talk which always falters before the complete proscription of privacy’ (AS, pp. 167–8). His identity is threatened by the construction industry – the houses, built temporarily, casually, often expensively, as an expression of American progress which is unable to discriminate between the

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public and private, stand as a negation of his achieved selfhood. James belongs to what Howard M. Feinstein describes as one of ‘those New England families whose formal manners made open conflict unthinkable’,8 and Carol Holly elaborates the general characteristics of the dynamics of such a family of ‘enmeshed group identity’: the consequences are that ‘negative affect will be suppressed, shameful secrets suppressed, conflict avoided, and intense loyalty and dependency fostered for the sake of family harmony and order’.9 Conceding the accuracy of these characterizations of the James family as an arena for dysfunction and neurosis, recalling the large, many-roomed, many-levelled homes referred to in his autobiographical writing, and the restless self-explorations which occur in some of the sinister rooms of the latest fiction, the potential for exposure, the impossibility of solitude in these houses must have horrified James. They stand as a public, if not national denial of the circumstances of his past, of human mystery, and thus of the composition of his own self. The issues have moved beyond the architectural: James is assimilating what he calls ‘the gregarious state’ (AS, p. 102). Careless of division or privacy, it serves to signal something of what he refers to more than once as the ‘American spirit’, a condition which seems both to attract and appal. In a typically evolved and synthesizing emblem of social function, James offers the ‘hotel-world’ as a sign of twentieth-century civilization – ‘one of the great caravansaries’ to which he is admitted one ‘winter afternoon’ (AS, p. 99). With a calculated diffidence, confessing to the kind of error by which ‘the seer of great cities’ may select one ‘glimpse’ rather than another, this experience is embodied as ‘the supremely significant one’ (AS, p. 100). It was the moment when ‘New York told me more of her story at once, then and there, than she was again and elsewhere to tell’. The ‘scene’, in contrast with other more abstract messages which hang in the air, is grounded in the tangible, phenomenal and contemporary, to be pressed initially by James into illustrating something of the social spirit (both beautiful and potentially damned) of New York. The brilliance of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel may be briefly jeopardized by the external shot with which this rhapsodic, if satirical episode opens. The experience of being in the city is itself a violent attack on the senses, the result of a town-planning nightmare and ‘the penalty of her primal topographic curse’ (AS, p. 100). Besieged by the ‘assault of the street’ as bullet-like electric cars speed past, the Waldorf, transformed by the narrator into a plaintive if welcoming figure of womanhood (or, more powerfully, motherhood), must beckon in all her helplessness and a touch of European sophistication for attention. For the time she is reduced, ‘sitting … with her open lap and arms … to confessing, with a strained smile … how little, outside her mere swing-door, she can do for you’, but it is almost a comically patriotic duty to dare the crossing she assures ‘any good American’ (to which James bravely accedes):

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Writing the Self: Henry James and America

‘“Un bon mouvement, therefore: you must make a dash for it, but you’ll see I’m worth it”’ (AS, p. 101). The maternal role is quickly transcended when the swarming scene within becomes ‘the amazing hotel-world’, though, beyond characterizing its inhabitants as representing money and what is ‘“respectable”’ (the only two values which, with some irony denoted by those quotation marks, erect a defence against ‘the gregarious state’), James remains on a level of generality. The term ‘American spirit’ repeatedly emphasizes the spectacle’s national status, and indeed the observed scene before him takes on the rituals of worship and religious duty. The richness and enterprise of this civilization, or at least ‘a synonym for civilization’, lies in the devoted unanimity of its followers and (importantly) their self-confirming reassurances. They compose themselves in a state of ‘promiscuity’, a randomly mixed group, which seems in its disparateness self-energizing: it ‘came and went there, all on its own splendid terms and with an encompassing material splendour, a wealth and variety of constituted picture and background, that might well feed it with the finest illusions about itself ’ (AS, pp. 102–3). Like the Church of the Ascension, decorated by James’s old friend John La Farge, the Waldorf is a refuge from the onslaught of the city with its ‘clangorous charge of cars’. The comparison is apposite: this microcosm which epitomizes the luxury of material possessions in a community of like-minded people, constantly changing yet united by the values of wealth and respectability, characteristically ‘speaks’ to James (with a hint of biblical archaism) ‘as a temple builded, with clustering chapels and shrines’. Its supplicants are the ‘innumerable huge-hatted ladies’ who as the ‘serene faithful’ wander in this ‘gilded and storied labyrinth’. In a dismissive satirical gesture it could, of course, be a temple to Mammon or Dagon; indeed this observed communing ‘to some inimitable New York tune’ with ‘the shade of Marie Antoinette in the queer recaptured actuality of an easy Versailles or an intimate Trianon’ foretells, if not an awaiting doom, some imminent displacement. James’s tone sustains a thinly-spun irony arising not merely from misgivings about the vulgarity of such wealth but from a consistent sexual anxiety. Those acidly picked out amongst the crowds are female – ‘persuasive peddling actresses’ or ‘German lady-patronesses (of I know not what)’ (AS, pp. 105–6) – with no hint of physical ‘allure’, and stimulating none of the sudden excitement of those male crowds which bore down upon him. But the scene reveals, as well as great opulence, the beneficent exercise of wealth, a ‘vente de charité’, as he puts it, which helps redeem the capitalist consumer dream. The panorama offers an amorphous, bewildering beauty embodied in ‘a gorgeous golden blur, a paradise peopled with unmistakable American shapes’; it is an aspect of the nation, exemplary of ‘American genius for organization’, of ‘ubiquitous American force’, of ‘American character’ – the epithet reiterated to establish the scene’s metonymic operation. The coherence

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of this group – ‘here was a social order in positively stable equilibrium’, ‘here was a world whose relation to its form and medium was practically imperturbable’, ‘here was a conception of publicity as the vital medium’ – overwhelms the observer, though those untypically clustered anaphoric clauses signal an erosion of conviction. In the rhetorical profusion which mirrors his ‘engulfing’ in this ‘very expensive air’ it might be easy to miss, as here, for instance, the corporate dedication to mere ‘publicity’. Unable to grasp the detail before him, James must simply yield to the ‘mere eloquence of the general truth’ (AS, pp. 105–6). In this temple which celebrates the material, whose personnel represent the power of acquired wealth,10 an external and greater agency is disclosed, figuratively and retrospectively, as in fact controlling this apparent autonomy. With a sense of drama James stresses that this is what he ‘sees’ as he recalls the crowd ‘overswept by the colossal extended arms … of some high-stationed orchestral leader, the absolute presiding power … controlling and commanding the whole volume of sound, keeping the whole effect together and making it what it is’. They are unknowingly in thrall, then, to some shaping, animating force and immediately their leader, or conductor, is transformed into a puppet-master who thus reduces these ‘master-spirits of management’ to a deeper state of abjection; they become ‘an army of puppets whose strings the wealth of his technical imagination teaches him innumerable ways of pulling, and yet whose innocent, whose always ingenuous agitation of their members he has found means to make them think of themselves as delightfully free and easy’ (AS, pp. 106–7).11 This initially and reassuringly familiar Thackerayan figure effortlessly combines a damning critique of contemporary values and accumulated social confidence with a recognition of the pathos of their unenlightened condition. Like the New York inhabitants who must live in apartments offering only a ‘diffused vagueness of separation’ (AS, p. 166), they remain obliviously disempowered and infantilized. The scene is retained as an impression of ‘perfection’ so that ‘for fear of its being spoiled by some chance false note, I never went into the place again’ (AS, p. 107). The affirmatory ‘I see’ which controls this episode suggests more than the divinatory formula of the fortune-teller, though it has a comparable declamatory effect, namely as a formal sign of an act which serves to illustrate the dynamics of nation. It is a reliving of the event, freed from the uncertainties of ‘impression’, the dominant observational mode of The American Scene. If this is the dramatically imagined critique of American society, a narrative of shifting colours and ambiguous display which embodies a political intention, its moments of inattentiveness, of hollowness and carelessness, of progress into ‘relatively dim self-knowledge’ are exposed as a scene of comic mundanity when, arriving in Florida after a long journey, the ‘analyst’ would have gone to bed hungry had he relied on the operation of the ‘hotel-world’. It has failed signally: far from antici-

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Writing the Self: Henry James and America

pating and providing for need – however extravagant or undreamt of – it has left the traveller unfed, regretting the ‘unsupplied mouthful’ (AS, pp. 439–40). This compacted vision of contemporary America, exposing what Ross Posnock calls ‘the instrumentality of bureaucratic control’,12 an observation elevated to the condition of representing the ‘American spirit’, so fully enacted that it seems that James seeks the most punitive means of demonstrating to himself the extent of his own alienation (a powerful term in this work). He stays to examine the nuances and performances contained in the Waldorf-Astoria, as if reiterating for his own learning the sight of a nation intent upon its own unquestioned progress, certainly oblivious to his own personal values, whether derived from the New or Old Worlds. America and its future are itemized in this ceaselessly shifting, glittering scene which thrives in denying any need for an inner life: some of James’s later fiction seems to tell us that you require darkness and silence to confront a version of the self, however horrific this may be. Meanwhile, the phenomena and spectacle of New York continued to arrange for James to be shaken and to be illuminated, to be granted fresh insights into the self previously unchallenged. In a further avoidance of the ‘subjunctivizing’13 of experience, the narrative dialectic is projected on to a number of voices, some identified only by the page headings. These extra-textual identifications (not included in all editions of The American Scene) can provide, as well as a necessarily cryptic, synthesizing label for the argument on the page below, a source of information unavailable in the text itself, as if James’s love of ‘complication’ were uncontainable. His divided feelings for the ‘“poor dear bad bold beauty”’ (AS, p. 109) of New York are projected on to what the page heading in this case indicates to be ‘the voice of the streets’ (AS, p. 107) and the text ‘the voice of the air’ (AS, p. 108). The self-indulgence of reversal, of alternative thoughts, or an over-characterized ‘I’ admitting some weakness of conviction is thus avoided as a brusque, pedestrian opinion takes over. Having touched on the ugliness of the streets and wondered at the rarity of anything which doesn’t ‘bellow and bang’ (AS, p. 107), the analyst is accosted by one such hectoring voice. ‘“It’s all very well to ‘criticize’”’, it begins, before going on to mock his ‘perversity’ in ‘“receiving through almost any accident of vision more impressions than you know what to do with”’. He simply hasn’t been acute enough in realizing the truth: ‘“You care for the terrible town, yea even for the ‘horrible’, as I have heard you call it … when you supposed no one would know”’ (AS, p. 108). New York is, after all, ‘“one of those to whom everything is always forgiven”’ (AS, p. 109). As James walks up Fifth Avenue a further interior drama erupts when a voice intervenes, ringing out ‘like the crack of that lash in the sky, the play of some mighty teamster’s whip’ to attack his most cherished regrets, the denial of ‘association’ which pulls down houses and obliterates tradition and

Surrendering to the Messages of New York

23

the past. This unidentified spirit of harsh modernity speaks, taking to task the pitying, kindly glance of the narrator, dismissing any ‘sentiment and sincerity’ which might speak for the ‘tread of generations’, pointing to the elevator14 and the omnibus as objects in which ‘tenderness of association’ (AS, p. 112) has no place. The dismembered New York he sees about him would be revisited and revived within the final life-writing acts of the following decade as he returned to a distant childhood. The depth of James’s feelings at the evident disposability of the city’s fabric, the demolition of locations which constitute, by his own characterization, aspects of his own identity (rather than merely memory), asserts itself in insights which note the relentless human agency which controls their destiny. He sees ‘in the thousand glassy eyes of these giants of the mere market’ an almost pitiful acknowledgment of ‘the finite, the menaced, the essentially invented state’. In all their cliff-like magnificence these skyscrapers are disposable, ‘the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written’. The buildings themselves become their own text and signal their fragile status. Currently the last word, they may be replaced at any time by ‘a word of still uglier meaning’. Founded on a belief in the ‘commercial at any cost’, they are subject to ‘the vocabulary of thrift at any cost’ (AS, p. 77), those plainly reiterated terms stressing the criteria and non-negotiable nature of the arrangement. The forceful evidence of the temporary and provisional in what replaces the objects of that landscape refines the cruelty of what is essentially an awakening for James. His visit to America coincided with the busiest years of mass immigration, when many people, principally from southern and eastern Europe, faced entry controls less stringent than those exercised later in the century. The racial anxiety concerning the America of the future implicit in his reference to a visit to the ‘terrible little Ellis Island’, setting for a ‘drama poignant and unforgettable’, gives way to shock at the dehumanizing entry process. The newly-arrived ‘stand appealing and waiting, marshalled, herded, divided, subdivided, sorted, sifted, searched, fumigated’. In a mood of chastened shock he warns ‘any sensitive citizen’ of the transforming nature of a visit and the ‘unwary’ are warned away (AS, pp. 84–5). In the context of his evolving reading of nation this impression ‘of two or three hours’ would metaphorically justify ‘a chapter by itself ’. In the event, the discourse diversifies into a series of metaphors. He watches an ‘act of ingurgitation’, a bodily digesting of the disparate peoples of the world in a scene which, in its capacity to stun, surpasses any ‘sword-swallowing or fire-swallowing of the circus’. Yet in a further admission of powerlessness – an added variant on the profusion of impressions which from the beginning threaten to overwhelm him – James cannot quite assimilate the enormity and inevitability of the process, or accept that what he has seen is ‘but as a tick or two of the mighty clock, the

24

Writing the Self: Henry James and America

clock that never, never stops’. He warns that ‘unwary’ citizen against disturbing any tranquil accord between self and nation lest (in a trope which again refers human anxiety to the no longer certain shelter of domestic privacy) he surprise ‘a ghost in his supposedly safe old house’ (AS, p. 85). That ‘sensitive citizen’ turns out to be James himself – a deferring gesture which allocates the weight of emotional experience to another, to objectivize and make an embryonic drama out of such insights. In this guise he maintains a form of privacy whilst simultaneously reclaiming his American self. ‘Citizen’ James had assumed that he knew ‘the degree in which it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien’, but the ‘truth’ has now come ‘home’. The initiation is equated to the Fall of Mankind, the loss of innocence and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden: he returns ‘not at all the same person that he went’, having ‘eaten of the tree of knowledge, and the taste will be for ever in his mouth’.15 This enlightenment into ‘the miscegenated American social order’, which Ross Posnock dismisses as ‘melodramatic excess’,16 certainly has its drama – especially evident in those rhetorical distinctions between prized ‘American’ abstractions of fate, consciousness and patriotism diminished, if not blighted, by the unimaginable ‘alien’. But it is more subtly the theatre of consciousness, the enactment of a profoundly moving perception which requires as a gesture towards privacy a devolving to a fictional other. America is in transition and this involves a dismantling of those elements which had sustained James’s convictions about himself and his American past. The scenes of New York are the most aggressive in exposing the extreme measures of the nation and its likely destiny, as well as, in their ties with his childhood, emphasizing the fragility of those earlier selves which James had accumulated. One of the late tales, ‘Crapy Cornelia’, touches upon similar ethnic tensions and interrogates without resolving the anxieties he reveals in The American Scene. Its aptly-named hero, White-Mason (he has no first name), toys (like Spencer Brydon and Lambert Strether) with the idea of marriage and is disturbed in his musings on the rich and eligible Mrs Worthingham by the sound of noisy (if genteel) children playing in Central Park. Belonging, significantly, to the ‘old’ New York of the 1860s, he and Cornelia survive as ‘conscious, ironic, pathetic survivors together of a dead and buried society’; he prefers ‘the tone of time’ to the ‘gloss of new money’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 353, 339, 338). If that earlier New York is consigned to the grave or granted antique status, an unresolved racial anxiety remains as he observes ‘the frilled and puckered and ribboned garb of the little girls, which had always a way … of so portentously flaunting the daughters of the strange native – that is of the overwhelmingly alien – populace at him’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 335).

Surrendering to the Messages of New York

25

Their distinctive clothing is read as the sign of the ‘alien’ in these children, but in The American Scene James’s sense of the otherness of race is expressed in the medium of his own profession: he reads inscriptions and messages, and hears voices, some intelligible, others mysterious. The real message of the voices heard as he walks through the colourful Bowery17 district lies in how individuals speak rather than in what they say. James invokes extremes and caricature, though even allowing for an element of self-mockery, he is revealed at his most restricted.18 The east side cafés with their lit tables at which sits ‘the mob sifted and strained’ (the self-selected Jews and ‘aliens’ of the neighbourhood) are transformed into the sinister torture-rooms of history. Incongruously and comically James is reminded of the time he had taken tea at the Tower of London, in a room ‘haunted by the shade of Guy Fawkes’ and been convinced that he heard ‘in pauses of talk, the faint groan of the ghost’. He hears similar sounds of torture now – ‘the piteous gasp’ of ‘the living idiom’ (AS, p. 139). It is the English language on the rack and what he hears will become the ‘Accent of the Future’. Whilst allowing disingenuously that this new language may develop into ‘the most beautiful on the globe’, he proclaims (with a significant pronominal shift which acts to draw a dividing line) that ‘we shall not know it for English’. By this time, of course, James’s own discourse, an aspect of his public identity, had reached a condition rendering it inaccessible to the majority in what his brother, William, called this ‘crowded and hurried reading age’. He went on cuttingly to characterize the novelist’s prose as ‘the illusion of a solid object, made … wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space’ (JF, p. 341). The shock, personal and financial, caused by the failure of the New York Edition of his fiction was still to come, but something of James’s own sense of obsolescence or not belonging – however disquieting he finds the ascendant threat of the new – is transferred to another figure which, like the ‘sensitive citizen’, enacts his own alienation, the self he is compelled to confront in the face of the disturbingly new. He has sought out ‘the Yiddish world’ amongst the beer houses and cafés, a ‘pious rosary of which I should like to tell each bead’, which proves too rich to detail (equably offending by his terms both Jews and Catholics). In the midst of ‘a sublimity of good conscience’ he notes ‘one of the party’ gasp at ‘the all-unconscious impudence of the agency of future ravage’ in its attack upon ‘our language as literature has hitherto known it’. This ‘incurable man of letters’ is a pathetic figure who thus lays possessive claim to a traditionally endorsed language; his most inspiring consolation in ‘an Americanized world’ is the knowledge that his difficulties, his ‘current to stem’, are undeniably his own. If America appears inimical to ‘letters’, the Old World offers creakingly

26

Writing the Self: Henry James and America

obsolete support – at least in figurative terms. What must be fought for is the honour of the ‘consecrated English tradition’ with which he has had ‘intimate communion’; but, in spite of the sacramental terminology, he is exposed as technologically ill-equipped. There are new monsters to be slain, and, as if anticipating a post-colonial ideology which will reallocate power and attend to new voices, James imagines this Spenserian figure upholding honour, an example of ‘old knighthood astride of its caparisoned charger’, ‘the proper spirit of St. George’, confronting a twentieth-century dragon: ‘this immensity of the alien presence climbing higher and higher, climbing itself into the very light of publicity’ (AS, pp. 137–8).19 The dehumanizing page headings in this chapter (including, on consecutive pages, ‘The Obsession of the Alien’, ‘The Ubiquity of the Alien’, ‘The Scale of the Infusion’) reveal a disturbing racial anxiety as James considers ‘the cauldron of the “American” character’ and, foreseeing future ‘brothers and sisters’, specifies that this is ‘the great “ethnic” question’. Another anonymous voice adds a supplementary question which puts in doubt future national identity: ‘“What meaning … can continue to attach to such a term as the ‘American’ character? – what type, as the result of such a prodigious amalgam, such a hotch-potch of racial ingredients, is to be conceived as shaping itself ?”’ (AS, pp. 120–1).20 In this radically defamiliarized territory which has removed the physical evidence or witness of what had seemed his stable past illustrative of a national and accountable ‘character’, or the narratives in which he has contained it, James is subjected to the most rigorous self-examination. It forms part of an initially destabilizing process which will essentially reconstruct and release him, allowing a franker expression of the self in both his personal and professional writing. The American Scene continuously exploits in its discursive method the bracing distance between the ephemeral impressions of the individual and the incalculable mystery, the ‘too-defiant scale of numerosity and quantity’ which the nation presents. Overburdened as the ‘spectator’ may be by scale and distance (used to ‘shorter journeys and more muffled concussions’), in a mood which touches upon ‘joy’ (that great creative agent of the Romantic period), he may feel ‘justified of the inward, the philosophic, escape into the immensity’. In the face of such size and profusion (after all, ‘what would a man make of a small America?’), with many luxuries ‘absent’, he may paradoxically make this state his ‘absolute luxury’. The comfort of any binary and defining opposition between ‘native’ and ‘alien’ has become eroded; the elements of meaning remain in an inchoate state; the profusion of facts arrests any attempt at exegesis, forming ‘too large a mass for a mere mouthful: it is as if the syllables were too numerous to make a legible word’. Having securely shifted the narrative away from the first person, James, in a characteristic moment of drama, fixes the great releasing moment to be enjoyed ‘to the best of his ability’. The message for this man of letters is incomprehensible

Surrendering to the Messages of New York

27

but magical as he lifts his eyes upwards to take in the multiplicity of ‘possibilities’: ‘the 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’ (AS, pp. 121–3).21 Such space, distance and freedom, revealing ‘the great face of New York’ from the water, recurrently characterize James’s most uplifted moments of insight. On his rearriving after a visit to ‘the Far West’ he is reminded of the ‘greatness of the subject’, as he makes an elaborate and almost royal progress by barge up the East River ‘at a certain hour of large circumnavigation’, still seated in his Pullman carriage of the Pennsylvania Railroad, en route for Boston. He avoids any need for ‘pushing through the terrible town’, and the animation of the scene before him, ‘nature and science … joyously romping together’, takes as a noted symbol ‘some collective presence of great circling and plunging, hovering and perching sea-birds, white-winged images of the restless freedom of the Bay’. From this perspective he can watch the genius of the Bay at play; at other times it had ‘seemed to blow its immense character straight into one’s face – coming “at” you, so to speak, bearing down on you, with the full force of a thousand prows of steamers seen exactly on the line of their longitudinal axis’ (AS, pp. 72–3). This acknowledgment of vulnerability and potential subjection to a greater, more dangerous power recalls the ambiguous attractions of the pushing male crowds he has encountered more closely. Yet in this glittering scene, ‘the whole picture … with its largest suggestion’ which was both ‘commanding and thrilling’, containing ‘mystery and wonder’, he seeks to identify the reason for ‘the beauty and the joy’ he feels. It lies in the physical pleasure of subjection and surrender to the ‘dauntless power’ of the city expressed in ‘every floating, hurrying, panting thing’, ‘the throb of ferries and tugs’, all becoming a kind of bacchanalian ‘great intricate frenzied dance’ composed of ‘the scattered members of the monstrous organism’ (AS, pp. 73–5). The connotations of the language suggest that James imagines his own willing submission to an appetite of prodigious, complicated strength. He confesses too (with another shift to the third person and an inverted kind of modesty as the ‘given observer’) his susceptibility to such an approach: ‘When this personage is open to corruption by almost any large view of an intensity of life, his vibrations tend to become a matter difficult even for him to explain’. Typical of such moments when he admits to intimate pleasure is the camply inflated designation of himself as ‘this personage’ and the shocked coyness of the italicized emphasis. In a synthesizing of the scene the ‘immeasurable bridges’ are likened to ‘the horizontal sheaths of pistons working at high pressure, day and night’, and subject to ‘merciless multiplication’. The message of industry will appear, dominating even the carefree vista before him as ‘the breezy brightness of the Bay puts on

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Writing the Self: Henry James and America

the semblance of the vast white page that awaits beyond any other perhaps the black overscoring of science’ (AS, pp. 74–5). From the water, the New York skyline, the ‘pin-cushion’ of tall buildings, may be transformed into a ‘loose nosegay of architectural flowers’, yet the city remains subject to the claims of the provisional. James continues to develop – however incongruously – the horticultural theme by seeing this current, if temporary beauty as a celebrated pink climbing rose. It is ‘the “American beauty”, the rose of interminable stem’, grown simply to be ‘“picked”, in time, with a shears’ ‘as soon as “science”, applied to gain, has put upon the table, from far up its sleeve, some more winning card’ (AS, pp. 76–7). With the mannered phraseology accentuated by those intrusive quotation marks, James fears that the future will be decided by a game of chance and the arbitrary choice of a winner’s self-interest. Within this densely configured impetus to translate the urban landscape into an animated complex of meanings – relentless yet beautiful, crushing yet fragile – James draws attention to himself both as excited observer and besotted victim, the first of which roles, of course, he had identified apologetically in default of any more dynamic influence in his formative years and to be recorded in the autobiographical writing. Where the trope of the pilgrim runs through the earlier writing (especially in the travel essays), in his later, twentieth-century phase James has moved away from this devotional model to a freely admitted physicality of apprehension, a bodily shudder of ‘vibration’.22 James’s arrival in Hoboken, New Jersey, passage through New York, and brief stay at Deal Beach, New Jersey, had been auspicious, a happy mood sustained on his ferry crossing. He was met and shepherded through the crowds by his young nephew, the ‘blessed’ Harry, his eye caught as he travelled on ‘a shining steamer bound for the Jersey shore’ by his fellow commuters. He is surrounded by ‘a rare collection of young men of business’, ‘in the pride of their youth and their might’ (AS, p. 5), and their physical presence becomes integral to the bright, buoyant anticipation of the enormous subject – a continent and its culture, and (less formally signalled) a consequent revision and reassembling of the self – which awaits him. A letter of the time to the editor of the North American Review, which would publish single chapters from The American Scene (though he is here making his pitch), marks a similarly uplifted mood: ‘I shall be able not only to write the best book (of social and pictorial and, as it were, human observation) ever devoted to this country, but one of the best – or why “drag in” one of, why not say frankly the Best? – ever devoted to any country at all’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 327). The ferry scene is shockingly profligate: ‘the subject was everywhere’. And even at such a spontaneous time, the experienced James can hear warnings of future danger: ‘there might even be a certain recklessness in the largest surrender to impressions’ (AS, p. 3).

Surrendering to the Messages of New York

29

With an excitement marked by cumulative qualifications, double negatives and favoured abstractions, he regards his fellow passengers as ‘treasures of “type”’, exemplary models for social observation, which, if he ignored, ‘the fault would be all his own’. In their unconsciousness the young men are subjected to his gaze, an act introducing an extended figurative medium whose application is clearly erotic. Sitting in ‘the noble amplitude of the boat’ he imagines a ‘simple sense of treasure to be gathered in’. He luxuriates in the anticipation of what he is offered, ‘the objective reality of impressions’ which can ‘deliciously be left to ripen, like golden apples, on the tree’. This, then, is ‘the charm’, the ‘strange and inordinate charm’, given ‘to every inch of the entertainment’. His eye returns, is constantly drawn back, to the ‘unconscious affluence, the variety in identity’ of the ‘young men of business’ – ‘for it most came back to that’, he confesses, exuberantly praising ‘the gaiety of the light, the gladness of the air’ (AS, pp. 5–6). ‘Driven, driven further and further, into the large lucidity of – well, of what else shall I call it but a New Jersey condition?’, betrayed almost into incoherence by the continuing, relentless pleasure, he confesses to the paradoxical mix of a speculation and curiosity which are both ‘exciting’ and, at the same time, ‘beguilingly safe’. In a further deferment of gratification he imagines, with feelings ‘sharpened to the last pleasantness’, gazing up at ‘the apples of gold’, ‘those thick-growing items … that were surely going to drop into one’s hand … as soon as one could begin to hold it out’ (AS, p. 6). In his anonymous admiration James might have been the speaker in Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’: ‘On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose, / And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, / than you might suppose’.23 Young men continue to preoccupy him in the American Journal II, some private notes made during this trip. Assessing the role of the Country Club in New England society, James asks what its ‘values’ are: Wasn’t the ‘sport’ image of the young people, the straight brown young men, with strong good figures and homely faces, one of them? I mean as associated with that of the strong, charmless (work that ‘charmless’ right), stalwart, slangy girls, in whom one feels the intimation, the consequence, of the absence of danger, from the men – as one feels throughout, in the N.E., in each sex, the absence of a sense, the absence of the consciousness, of, or of the existence of, danger from the other.24

More striking than his intuitive sense of mystery lacking, as he sees it, between the sexes, is his gender discrimination, the way in which he sees young men in their physical uprightness and strength, and merely (with a carelessness denoted by the parenthesized reminder) evaluates the young women in a generally pejorative way as ‘stalwart’ and ‘slangy’, remaining quite untouched by their physical presence. The discourse of The American Scene is, of course, more reflective and

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Writing the Self: Henry James and America

studied, and in the late writings of these years he will elaborate the privately evolved associations between a construct of masculinity and business which he identifies as the shaping force of twentieth-century America. The ‘whole spreading bough’ of that ‘very wonderful afternoon’ of his ferry ride to New Jersey, the developed symbol of those young men, provides the uplifting, optimistic impressions for an appropriate, almost Blake-like beginning to the whole enterprise: ‘They came out to meet us, in their actuality, in the soft afternoon; they stood, artless, unconscious, unshamed, at the very gates of Appearance’ (AS, p. 7).

3 BOSTON AND CAMBRIDGE: INITIATIONS FROM THE PAST

Despite the ‘invitation written on the very face of the place itself ’ (AS, p. 226), appropriate for a returning inhabitant, Boston (and Cambridge too) contains ghosts at every corner which flee in shame and humiliation, compelling James himself to avert his eyes. Of all the locations of The American Scene, Boston represents most pressingly a part of his past whose disclosure is hinted at and promised though never explicitly detailed. In a seeming embarrassment he verges on autobiography whilst pursuing a language which is anonymous and indirect; he remains the ‘restless analyst’, and, more humbly, the ‘ingenuous inquirer’, the ‘revisiting spirit’, as well as the ‘story-seeker’ (AS, pp. 236, 245, 227) – self-concealing and evasive characterizations indicating an autonomy and assertiveness, a fleeting, offhand, role-playing confidence which is not sustained by the diffident, retreating behaviour recorded in those Boston streets. He never reveals what stories he is seeking, nor shares the ‘dozen stored secrets’ held in a locked drawer. There is, in any case, no guarantee that they will not be trivial – ‘some handful of odds and ends … which, being brought out, might promote, by their blinking consciousness, either derision or respect’ – though, for James himself, they contain ‘an extraordinary tenderness’ (AS, p. 58). The discourse gestures towards disclosure, suggests the private value of the experience, and finally turns away in fear of ridicule. Boston embodies what James so deprecatingly calls ‘the other time’ – his youth, which had contained in all their ‘smallness’ his ‘prime initiations’ (AS, p. 227) which had yet left ‘consequences out of proportion’ to the original experience. As we shall see, ‘initiations’ represent for James the strongest of formative experiences. He refers to the early 1860s, the period of intense friendships, continued family involvement and the beginning of a career in literature. It is ‘the closing-time of the War – full both of public and of intimate vibrations’, and, as he walks down Ashburton Place, where he had spent two years of his youth, he strives to ‘spot some echo of ghostly footsteps – the sounds as of taps on the window-pane heard in the dim dawn’ (AS, p. 229). With such lonely associations, the place returns him to his conceived earlier self with emphatically recorded ‘old – 31 –

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Writing the Self: Henry James and America

secrets to keep and old stories to witness for’, ‘a saturation of life … preserved … as the scent lingering in a folded pocket-handkerchief ’. The increasingly urbanized landscapes of Boston and Cambridge, so transformed since James’s early years, seem disturbingly and anonymously threatening places in which the living are seen as an indifferent mass and only the dead or absent have a distinctive individuality. The ‘New Bostonians’ (as indicated in a page heading) whom he now observes deny James’s past and excite a degree of ethnic and social anxiety. The crowds of Italian immigrants and other speakers of ‘outland dialects’ wander across Beacon Hill on a Sunday afternoon. James hears no American vernacular: ‘the people before me were gross aliens to a man, and they were in serene and triumphant possession’ (AS, p. 231). Even across the Charles River in Cambridge the ‘swarming ingenuous youths’ who come to claim Harvard Yard in term-time are subjected to a scrutiny and italicized questioning made urgent by excitement in ‘a game that it was positively thrilling to play out’. ‘Whom did they look like the sons of ?’, he is compelled to wonder in that uneasy syntax, and the answer remains simple and generic: even discounting all factors except the physical, he is assaulted by the conviction that this is ‘the unmitigated “business man” face’, of which there is an ‘overwhelming preponderance’ (AS, p. 64) in America and to whom he has been drawn in New York. When James was their age, his father had regretted the national trend, even then, towards similarly acquisitive values: ‘I never felt proud of my country for … her ability to foster the rapid accumulation of private wealth’.1 The observed working classes, the young men of Harvard, represent some forbidding models of otherness which James sees all around. In keeping with his vocation of ‘letters’, it is language, its availability and susceptibility to frequent corruption which has the power to disturb. In this moment of mass immigration, of increasing literacy, of a professionalized society, James’s isolation from the nation’s changing identity is all too clear, as are the ironies of his father’s distrust of rapidly accumulated wealth (he and his family were the beneficiaries of a fortune based on real estate, as critics have pointed out). If forgetful of his own original family circumstances, James moves beyond aloofness towards that majority who are all ‘in’ something (AS, p. 249) to consider prime issues of nationality of the kind which pressed upon him at Ellis Island; that is, ‘what might be becoming of us all, “typically”, ethnically, and thereby physiognomically, linguistically, personally?’ He realizes too, naturally, that the meaning of ‘us all’ no longer embraces the greater national certainties or simplicities of his youth. James’s male-dominated language serves to reflect, it seems, the social dynamics before him, where he sees ‘a society of women “located” in a world of men’ and offers a clarifying analogy by which men supply ‘as it were, all the canvas, and the women all the embroidery’ (AS, pp. 64, 66). He is understandably lost amongst this cultural mix of social and ethnic identities.

Boston and Cambridge: Initiations from the Past

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What had served as a metaphor for alienation in New York – an inability to ‘read’ the message of the words and letters before him – takes on more literal urgency in Boston. Inroads on the language ( James’s passing references construct it as an accepted, clearly defined entity, quite distinct from the fluid identity of ‘us all’ as a nation) are detected everywhere, in the spoken idiom overheard as well as in written form. Even the authority of the printed word is being eroded; he considers popular culture of the time and queries, whatever its innocence, whether, for instance, ‘value is expressed … by the little tales, mostly by ladies, and about and for children romping through the ruins of the Language, in the monthly magazines’ (AS, p. 242). Such evidence constitutes the strangeness of contemporary Boston which has dismantled any past securities. Man of letters or culture as he sees himself, he has become sidelined and vulnerable, suggesting that the developing values he has adduced from the constructed narrative of his own life have been disturbed and he finds no reassurance of a public or general kind. If the humanity he observes carelessly underscores his own irrelevance, indeed, in its representative multiplicity of languages is in process of changing the ethnic constitution of the nation itself, the ‘remembering mind’ (AS, p. 60), product of the established culture (however obsolescent) and a resource which exemplifies the value of subjectivity, can turn to buildings for reassurance of the reality of the past. The prime location for such messages is predictably exclusive. Harvard may already, to James’s eyes, contain faces which signify a utilitarian future, but was an unlikely long-term goal for those Sunday afternoon crowds; aside from long-standing friendships with many of its staff, James’s closest link was through William, one of the university’s most distinguished teachers.2 In the ‘great hall of the Union’ at Harvard he feels ‘the actual vibration of response’ ‘turn to audible music’ (AS, p. 60) whilst other buildings, Massachusetts and Stoughton Halls, recognizably and almost fussily historic – ‘archaic’, with ‘primitive details’ and ‘small “quaintnesses” of form’, speak from a rich source which succeeds in ‘running thick’. In contrast with the ‘importunate newness’ around, they have sheltered past generations. Their story remains, however, peripheral, unheard by the majority; it is attuned to a ‘minor key’, adding to the ‘great main current of ghostly gossip’. Yet James catches the impassioned protest from these buildings that they count, that they are distinct from the overwhelmingly ‘vulgar’ which surrounds them: ‘“we are getting almost ripe, ripe enough to justify the question of taste about us … we are … entering into the dignity of time, the beauty of life”’ (AS, p. 63). These phrases which James hears, with their late-Shakespearean echoes, patently transcend the medium of gossip, however small their audience. Indeed they are perhaps only audible to the few, already touched by time and life. They were drafted as preliminary notes for The American Scene, now contained in the

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extant American Journal II. The fragment there begins: ‘… expressively (articulatedly) to the kind old eyes: “See, see, we are getting older, we are getting almost old – old enough; we are taking it on and entering into the beauty of time and the dignity of life – we are at last beginning. We don’t look now like anything else, do we?” – etc., etc.’ (CN, p. 234). That burden (in both senses) of being ‘old’ is replaced in the final text by the gentler idea of ripeness, as understood in ‘ripeness is all’, and thus ‘men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither’, in Edgar’s wise speech from King Lear. Whether the ‘kind old eyes’ relate to James or to some abstraction of Time, or, most likely from the final context in The American Scene, the ‘many-paned windows’ of the buildings, he seems to associate himself, in this less hectoring version, with those same cloistered Harvard virtues. Without reference to its final destination, the editors of the Collected Notebooks comment that this fragment is ‘apparently a continuation from one of the notebooks no longer extant’, but it is clear that, unlike much of the material that follows, the entry is a draft for the dramatized pleas heard from those halls of ‘archaic pink … brickwork’. Embodying a simpler national history, showing ‘the tone of time’ (AS, p. 63), and linked by distant but personal association, such buildings dismiss objective aesthetic rigour. James found Alumni Hall, better known as the Memorial Hall and built to commemorate the Harvard dead of the Civil War, with its ‘too scant presence of the massive and the mature’ to be poised ‘in slightly prosaic equilibrium’. In the face of the Union building, that strangely ‘grim visitor’, criticism, is silenced, must turn away, ‘a trifle ruefully whistling’, and lose his identity, entering ‘some relaxing air of mere sentimental, mere shameless association’ (AS, pp. 61–2), a softer, less judgmental option which implies that James himself must slough off one of his principal avocations. In such an emphatically circumscribed, rarefied location, remote from the density and sounds of the new Bostonians, the deathly character of the critic is defiantly cast off for what is characterized as a nostalgic interlude. But despite the deprecation, the moment includes a rallying from the shock of the new America – the ongoing assault on the ageing novelist – and a refinding of the old, but newly configured conditions of the James of the 1860s, and his period of pre-European adulthood. The old, ‘Arcadian’ Cambridge had been anticipated during the writing of William Wetmore Story and his Friends, which had come out in 1903, offering a welcome opportunity for digression from the work’s unstimulating subject. The sculptor, who had died in Italy in 1893, was an expatriate Bostonian who had trained for the law at Harvard, and James imagines a Cambridge which, simple and unspoilt, will bear no interrogation and which he will subject to no qualifying caveats from fallen modernity. With allusions to classical pastoral and the landscapes of mid-nineteenth-century Barbizon, James returns to a generation

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earlier than his own, in a consciously constructed painting of a New World idyll, ‘a picture of young affections and alliances dancing, ever so mirthfully, of warm summer evenings, among the slim, vague Corot trees of the old Harvard “yard”, to the sound of the oaten pipe. That note indeed – the murmur of Arcady itself, that of innocent versified homage, precocious and profuse, mingled with the rustle of feathery elms – pervades the crepuscular scene and makes us think of it wistfully.’3 That pastoral memory, with its odd echoes of Milton or Spenser, strives, even in the context of the biography, for an impossible perfection, a selfinduced condition creating a hunger for a landscape and society which predates even James’s youth, remote too from the Roman scenes and the celebrated apartments of the Palazzo Barberini where Story spent much of his life. Yet even in Boston, the brutal American endorsement of everything provisional also prevails. Having once returned to look at the family home in Ashburton Place where he had lived in the 1860s, James finds that, by the time of his second visit, the house has been demolished. This ‘rupture’ causes a dizzying, disorientating loss of identity as history itself unravels: ‘It was as if the bottom had fallen out of one’s own biography, and one plunged backward into space without meeting anything’. In this simile which notes the status of the written record, the victim is propelled helplessly through infinity. While the houses stood, he had read ‘into one of them a short page of history … the history of two years of far-away youth’, a document accessible to one reader only. The scene contains his own life, its value unique in the nuances it may record. With a dizzying swiftness which irrevocably deletes a phase of the past, the demolition constitutes ‘the whole figure of my connection with everything about, a connection that had been sharp … and then had broken short off ’ (AS, pp. 229–30), a dislocation itself mirrored in the lexical and syntactical deviance of the sentence. Even the site for potential nostalgia has been brutally removed. If this moment encapsulates America’s careless dismissal of the past (the Boston Athenaeum, ‘the temple of culture’, now ‘overtowered’ by larger buildings (AS, p. 232), is a public version of this civic hooliganism), it constitutes a more personal attack, threatening James’s own narrative of his Boston years even as he returns to compose it. With a more distant perspective, James continues to view and review his past through the urban landscape of Boston, as he points out in a parenthesis: ‘always on my hilltop and raking the prospect over for memories’. He appears (in a characteristic comparison which has associations with some of the less threatening female characters of his fiction) most at ease on Mount Vernon Street, its charm ‘like some good flushed lady, of more than middle age’, and its slope ‘as beautifully peopled as Jacob’s ladder’. If the ghosts of Charles Street with its ‘lapse into shabbiness and bad company’ tend to flee, or ‘linger at the most with faces ashamed’, those belonging to Beacon Hill have an assertive, and proudly propri-

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etorial air, like the custodians of an art gallery, ‘taking pleasure in this place, fairly indeed commending to me the fine old style of the picture’ (AS, pp. 242–4). In narrating these scenes of urban life James’s discourse tends to avoid agency and in a self-concealing gesture devolves responsibility for the insights to other sources. A picture composes itself, specifics emerge out of generality and the text records his passively ‘vibrating’ to the data before him. He has admired the newly-framed formality of Harvard Yard: ‘few fresh circumstances struck me as falling more happily into the picture than this especial decency of the definite’ (AS, p. 62). Even when he had ‘read into anything’, as opposed to reporting ‘what one read out of it’, the process develops independently: ‘the occasions that operated for that mild magic resolve themselves now into three or four of an intrinsic colour so dim as to be otherwise well-nigh indistinguishable’ (AS, p. 68). Under such beguilement, and with little ‘variation of insistence’ in the availability of material, James, playfully and perhaps oxymoronically, characterizes his condition as one of ‘adventurous contemplation’, signalling, once again, a conviction of the energy of imagination. The narrative moments of these excursions in Boston and Cambridge allow James to construct a figure, ageing and alone, subject to nostalgia, as he seeks out his young self of the 1860s. The favoured conditions of James’s visits point to a congenial silence, an autumnal season transposing ‘everything … into another key’ (AS, p. 59), an emptiness of scene, a twilight period, a condition reflecting the mood of the solitary returner who sees continuously and almost exclusively ghosts about him. He has driven the short distance from Boston to Cambridge ‘through the warm September night’, recalling ‘the odorous hour’, ‘the old distinctively American earth-smell, which in the darkness fairly poetized the suburbs’ (AS, p. 56). This is the ‘brief idyll’ when students are on vacation, and ‘so long as the spell of autumn lasted’, ‘one would walk in the idyll, if only from hour to hour, while one could’ (AS, p. 59). It is unsurprising in such circumstances that ‘business’ should so offend as ‘one loud voice’ (AS, p. 241), even in the shadow of Harvard where, in some imagined library perhaps, ‘titles embodied in literary form are less and less likely … to be asked for’ (AS, p. 69). It is as if one of the national arbiters of learning and culture is turning its back on this ‘literary’ man, carelessly and without malice formalizing his irrelevance. The sociocultural terms of James’s unease within the new, urban crowds of New England have a private, revelatory equivalent which become evident in passing observational moments which tell of isolation and embattlement. Whatever its relations with a complex and distant past, James’s narrated identity timidly but no less pointedly avoids interaction with the living and contemporary. It is as if his return has, in some way related to the manifestly casual annihilation of the tokens of tradition, confirmed for James a peripheral place and a diminished function so that his text needs to register the tenuous condition of the observer:

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‘I felt my small cluster of early associations shrivel to a scarce discernible point’ (AS, p. 230). Though reassured to find the Athenaeum, ‘library, gallery, temple of culture’, unchanged, he records it now surrounded by ‘brute ugliness’; he must pass on, ‘averting one’s head from an humiliation one could do nothing to make less’ (AS, p. 232). The outrages of uncouth modernity are absorbed into James’s own helpless self-sacrificial shame so that he is himself reduced to a powerless ghost. He recoils, not primarily on aesthetic grounds, but in fear of a danger which may turn on him. In his fiction he will go on, in an anthropomorphic mode, to regard buildings and houses as living presences, even offering opportunities for psychic self-exploration. The condition of fearfulness is marked by figurative and literal expressions of containment and protection, thresholds and portals, some too forbidding to be crossed. James’s return to Boston reminds him of his own isolation and a lack of human contacts: ‘the slight bridge had long ago collapsed’. His youthful years there had been brief but filled with an ‘intensity’ reflecting the ‘inordinate power of assimilation of the imaginative young’. In a moment of revelation which accentuates, oxymoronically, the ‘immense little extent’ of his own presence and the ‘quite subjective character’ of the individual’s apprehension of history, he is further enlightened by the revealing spirit of the past itself, ‘the question suddenly … lighted for me as by a sudden flicker of the torch … carried in the hand of history’ (AS, p. 227). The beneficent figure of history might remind us of Liberty herself, who had recently welcomed James to his native land and to his past, ‘A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name / Mother of Exiles’.4 This most familiar symbol of nationhood and values which witnessed the arrival of so many thousands in these years had been installed on Bedloe’s Island only in 1886 and so, on this 1904–5 trip, James would have seen it for the first time. The American Scene includes no record of his reaction. Beside the imagined bridges and breakwaters, water itself constitutes a frequent figurative danger. He had been a guest of Mr and Mrs Fields long ago in the drawing room behind the ‘effaced, anonymous door’ of their house in Boston’s now shabby Charles Street, with its view of the Back Bay, and valued as ‘the little ark of the modern deluge’. The place has become ‘soiled and sordid’ so that even the ghosts ‘linger at the most with faces ashamed and as if appealing against their association’ (AS, p. 244). As James had found a lofty refuge on Mount Vernon Street, his imagined course through Cambridge again raises him above danger of involvement. He projects (with a linguistic archaism) a ‘builded breakwater against the assault of matters demanding a literal notation’ and walks ‘but on the breakwater – looking down, if one would, over the flood of the real, but much more occupied with the sight of the old Cambridge ghosts’ (AS, p. 68). In the vacation tranquillity of the Harvard Law Library he sees in the distance ‘a distinguished friend’ (John

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Writing the Self: Henry James and America

Chipman Gray, recipient of the letters of his long-dead cousin, Mary, or more familiarly Minny, Temple), a real presence rather than a ghost, yet he confesses a fear of approaching: ‘I should have had to cross the bridge that spans the gulf of time, and, with a suspicion of weak places, I was nervous about its bearing me’ (AS, p. 59). He prefers the silence of the ‘shades of a past that had once been so thick and warm and happy’ (AS, p. 244), unwilling to disturb the survivors of that same youthful era in some mutual re-enactment of earlier selves. The respite, or evasion, is temporary and self-induced; the ‘dozen stored secrets’ which have ‘lurked, for long, in a locked drawer’ which he has figuratively located in ‘the old Harvard’ and which excite ‘an extraordinary tenderness’ form a part of this ‘brief idyll’ which can last only ‘so long as the spell of the autumn lasted’. The hidden secrets, mere ‘odds and ends’, must concern the past – he catches himself ‘sniffing the very dust, prehistoric but still pungent, of the old’ – but they remain undisclosed, their reference too intricately private presumably, too distractingly autobiographical for the text. Indeed the discourse is enacting the ‘instinct’ (with the reader already recruited, or conspired with) to which James confesses in the face of ‘such delicacies’, ‘not to press, not to push on, till forced, through any half-open door of the real’. The diffidence is instinctive and temperamental, keen to preserve the moment of hesitation in face of the surrounding ‘real’: ‘The real was there, certainly enough, outside and all around, but there was standing-ground, more immediately, for a brief idyll, and one would walk in the idyll, if only from hour to hour, while one could’. The ‘happy trick’ (AS, pp. 58–9) is played as long as the season lasts. The formal enclosure of Harvard Yard5 pleases James on a number of grounds, one of which, in his satisfaction at being contained and reassured by a confining, protective barrier, reflects on a desire for untroubled psychic respite. Yet this Harvard innovation has both aesthetic and sociological applications for the novelist. Because it introduces a defining frame, this ‘drawing of the belt’ allows a compositional coherence to the buildings, and thus ‘immediately refines upon their interest, immediately establishes values’. The effect from within is transforming in ways which James’s figurative language suggests to be transcendingly human and reassuring, in tropes which invoke the lost and the found, the role inhabited, ‘the improved situation of the foundling who has discovered his family or of the actor who has mastered his part’. Yet College Yard is translated too into a symbol of resistance to broader, national ideals, indeed policies, in immigration terms, of the ‘“open door”’, though James avoids any contentious misgivings by suggesting that the ‘open door – as it figures here in respect to everything but trade – may make a magnificent place, but it makes poor places’ (AS, p. 62). Such a policy may suit the needs and ideals of an ever-expanding nation, yet, for James, in his dismay at the public arena of human exchange at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, his horror at the absence of domestic privacy in the houses of the New Jersey shore,

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such openness entails dangers for the sentient individual which remain unacknowledged by the grand vision which inspires the nation. Elsewhere he characterizes his role and his knowledge, whatever the redeeming secrets which invite such ‘tenderness’, as hopelessly antique, thus freeing himself to criticize and to be dismissed uncontroversially. He has returned ‘knowing his subject too well’: his is ‘the case of the bottle too full for the wine to start’, and indeed his ‘“old” knowledge’ is of a Boston as faded as ‘a “sunk” picture’ – ‘that dead state of surface which requires a fresh application of varnish’ (AS, p. 226). The images have a rhetorical application, self-deprecatingly disarming the reader and allowing for critical observations on the nation. In two pages where ‘America’ is invoked six times indicating the breadth of his application, it is the simplest and most specific of witnessed moments which serve to illustrate the absence of ‘balm’ in a social transaction as banal as shopping. Wondering ‘how the shopman or the shoplady can bear to be barked at in the manner he constantly hears used to them by customers’, he interprets the scene as simply ‘a necessary vicious circle of gross mutual endurance’ (AS, p. 236). His earlier self has been relegated, for these purposes, to some dusty, unyielding elite condition, and one might interpret the reference to the overfull wine bottle as a deep-seated return to his chronic constipation suffered in early manhood, an ongoing topic of mutual interest in the letters between William and Henry James.6 From the bottom of the hill, spread southwards and westwards ‘the new splendours’ of the city, as James notes with a touch of irony. But the ‘concentrated Boston of history’, is validated by the names of eminent men of letters, ‘Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Ticknor, Motley, Prescott, Parkman and the rest’. This city (seen without any animating human complication) is again relegated to history, even to the detail of a picture, ‘picturesquely mediæval’ and ‘“composed” … as the finished background of a Dürer print’ (AS, p. 245), as if to mute the past, even the remembered reality of his own history, temporarily preserving the experience in the stillness and privacy of art. Showing a similar diffidence, James feels obliged, on looking at Park Street, to pronounce this example of ‘old distinction’ and ‘indefinable perfection’ as ‘violently vulgarized’. The use of foreign terms can, in James, signify a level of unease. When, near the end of The Ambassadors, Mme de Vionnet has been discovered by Strether sharing a skiff with Chad Newsome, a moment which exposes the true nature of their intimacy, she is panicked into speaking in rapid, idiomatic French, quite beyond Strether’s grasp. On Park Street he retreats into the guise of the man of letters (the obsolete cultural arbiter imagined in the New York chapter), and feels compelled (with an attention-seeking if apologetic preamble) to discard English altogether and ‘borrow from the French’. Park Street is both ‘honnête and strong – strong as founded on all the moral, material, social solidities’. It is composed of ‘each member of the row, from the church at the Tremont

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Street angle to the amplest, squarest, most purple presence at the Beacon Street corner’, its buildings, now inanimate but reconstituted as a new lexical, subordinate presence, with each forming ‘a syllable in the word Respectable several times repeated’ (AS, p. 234). In that arch transition from ‘honnête’ to a capitalized ‘respectable’, even Boston’s most admired features have been subjected to an affectionate comic irony. Within the confines of Harvard itself, the man of letters finds a congenial setting: ‘the right provision had been made for the remembering mind’. The University’s attention may have been turned to ‘an enjoying and producing future’, causing it ‘to frown on mere commemoration’ or ‘the backward vision’, yet James finds these ‘a liberal monument to those who had come and gone’. Indeed the objects encompass his own lifetime – formal, highly accomplished artefacts, commemorating public, historic events which are intimately linked to his own remembered past. In the ‘beautiful new Union’ building, so much more successful, in James’s eyes, than ‘the great bristling brick Valhalla of the early “seventies”’, or Memorial Hall (AS, pp. 59–61), hangs a contemporary painting which can be read, aside from its aesthetic merit, as a symbol of civic benefaction, a document for American history, executed by an old friend, John Singer Sargent. So similar to James’s circumstances are Sargent’s, incidentally – a childhood spent in Europe with expatriate American parents, an established place within the highest circles of British Edwardian society, the capacity of his portraits to project what William James called a ‘social self ’,7 a single life of passionate friendships – that the painter might have emerged from James’s fiction. Sargent had provided decorative art for a number of Boston’s public buildings; this Harvard portrait had been completed as recently as 1903 during Sargent’s stay in the US and paid for by student subscription rather than private donor.8 The seated subject is Major Henry Lee Higginson who looks steadily out from the picture, bearing the signs of an honourable if distant military career: on his cheek is visible a sabre scar and his Union cavalry officer’s cloak covers his legs.9 The conventional view of Sargent as the portraitist of the public self is sidestepped as James praises the picture as ‘a representation of life and character, a projection of genius, which even that great painter has never outdone’.10 As if continuing to examine his own consciousness of public and private selves, of personality determined by experience, of (literally) facing the modern world while oftentimes besieged by congenial ghosts of the past, James admires the functions of ‘the supreme work of art’ ‘to make the human statement with a great effect, to interfuse a grasp of public acts with the personality, with the characteristics, of the actor’. For Higginson is the public figure, the great Harvard and Bostonian benefactor and ‘author … of innumerable … civil gifts’ (he had paid, after all, for the Harvard Student Union building in 1903), the antithesis of James’s self-

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representation (in a published medium at least) as diffident, tentative, resigned to a vicarious life. Taken by this relation between the public and private, he pursues the portrait’s skill in having interfused ‘a group of public acts with the personality, with the characteristics, of the actor’. This painting allows James to speculate on the redemptive links between public and private experience, indeed it embodies the humanity of the philanthropist, suggesting for ‘each beneficiary’ ‘a possible relation, a possible intimacy’. ‘Intimacy’ is reiterated as James characterizes the portrait (three times) as ‘the magic carpet’ which, ‘happening’ to be there (AS, pp. 60–1), offers the means for such subjective insights. Thus the portrait draws James on a number of grounds; aside from this admiration for its revelatory psychological insight, we may infer that in its subject’s embodiment of Civil War heroism, of enduring civic virtues and traditional Bostonian and national certainties, the painting represents the greatest (and perhaps most enviable) features of American manhood. When, in The Bostonians, Basil Ransom and Verena Tarrant had made their visit to the Memorial Hall, in interpreting the place as ‘a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity’ they had, as it were, sanctified the values most admired by James. The couple look at the white memorial tablets, each, ‘in its proud, sad clearness … inscribed with the name of a student-soldier’. Ransom himself, who has fought for the Confederacy, sees how the memorial embraces ‘the victims of defeat as well as the sons of triumph’.11 It is a moment of personal and family, as well as national, history. The names of two of James’s admired cousins, William James Temple and Gus Barker, are inscribed there as well as those of Robert Gould Shaw and Cabot James Russell, two of his brother Wilky’s fellow officers. The ‘company of lurking ghosts’ remains on this later occasion too, as James sees in their ‘collective beauty’ the ‘recording tablets of the members of the University sacrificed, on the Northern side, in the Civil War’ in ‘that house of honour and of hospitality’. Having criticized the architectural shortcomings of the place, James demurs and recants, bowing to progress and the broader intake of students (those whose faces fail to disclose recognizable family origins) – the ‘recent generations, gathered in from beneath emptier skies, who must have found in the big building as it stood an admonition and an ideal’ (AS, p. 61). While Harvard’s Memorial Hall stands as a shrine for its dead young men of the Civil War, and so of American history, the ‘effaced anonymous door’ of a house on Boston’s Charles Street, No. 28, offers James, in a more private dimension, specifically as the man of letters, a ‘merciful refuge’, a ‘votive temple to memory’, with ‘relics and tokens’. This emphatically hallowed site returns James to his earliest creative years, part of a formative selfhood which has links with a distinguished national past. Only here in these streets can the self-styled ‘starved story-seeker’ find familiar reassurance in an enthusiastic recounting of ‘wide benignity of brick’, the sense of a ‘solid seat of everything’ in these façades which

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allow for ‘happy deviations’ from conformity which ‘humanize’ ‘the blankness of the American street-page’. The reassuringly ageing houses ‘growing old’ in a way ‘we can scarcely bear’ in loved people, represent a rare American commodity which reflects James’s attachment to the private and unassertive which these ‘mere mild monuments of private worth’ embody. This reclusive, retrospective motive which endorses ‘the preservation of character and the continuity of tradition’ (AS, pp. 243–5) discloses James in closest relation to his own past and to family memories, clearly belonging to a disparate place and society – now conceivable only through the surviving architecture. But circumstances have changed: there has been a ‘lapse into shabbiness’ or (with distancing quotation marks) a ‘“decline in the social scale”’ which brings shame to the ghosts with which he peoples the streets, the ‘turbid medium in which the signs of their old life looked soiled and sordid’. By contrast, the past, by which he means the era of his own early writing, is simplified into something ‘thick and warm and happy’. This is ‘the Boston of history’, populated by the great men (predominantly) of nineteenth-century American literature. Meanwhile, James himself, reduced to a ‘revisiting spirit’, feels as shameful and out of place as the ghosts of Charles Street ‘from far, far back’, to be passed ‘in conscious silence’. In this erosion of identity made more acute by the familiar setting, one ‘little ark of the modern deluge’ remains behind an ‘effaced anonymous door’. James maintains this anonymity of a place with its ‘long drawing-room that looks over the water and toward the sunset’ which offers ‘a seat for every visiting shade’, as if in some preserving mood avoiding the actual or, indeed, the personal. The only named individual in this case is the ‘far-away Thackeray’ (AS, pp. 244–5) – sufficiently historical and celebrated to sustain the impersonal significance of what the page heading refers to as ‘The Haunted Drawing-Room’. The drawing room, or salon, belongs to James T. Fields and his wife, yet James never names them, as if by such restraint, deferring to the claims of privacy, avoiding disclosure, without understating his own condition. Fields had edited and published the Atlantic Monthly, the periodical which had contained many of James’s early short stories. Appropriately, and in conjunction with the Cornhill, a journal with the strongest Thackeray associations, the Atlantic Monthly published one of James’s last essays, ‘Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields’12 soon after the death of Mrs Fields. The essay, personal and affectionate, nevertheless encompasses the trauma of war. James begins in bleak wonder at the ‘fond fatuities’, the ‘innocent confidence’ which had allowed him (however ‘insanely’) to believe that ‘the worst horror’ of ‘the life of nations’ might not happen. From the World War (whose end he would not see) he moves back to the Civil War period, the ‘four years of free carnage’ (LCA, pp. 160–1), to consider his American years, ‘raking out’ ‘the charm … of the period, and the aspect of the Fieldses as bathed in that soft medium – so soft after the long internecine harshness’ (LCA, p. 169). It

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was here in ‘the generally teeming Fields atmosphere, that he became the ‘young observer’ and ‘devourer’, feeling ‘the brush of aesthetic, of social, of cultural suggestion’ (LCA, p. 171). Though he makes no mention of it in The American Scene, it must have been on his 1904–5 trip to America that James visited Mrs Fields in ‘her happy alternative home on the shining Massachusetts shore’ (LCA, p. 176), yet even this domestic occasion takes on historic proportions, a moment of contact with a celebrated token of the national past, re-enacted in an incongruously spectral light: ‘there supervenes for me … as the very last word … a haunted little feast as of ghosts, if not of skeletons, at the banquet, with the image of that immemorial and inextinguishable lady Mrs. Julia Ward Howe’ who was called upon to declaim ‘a little quaveringly, but ever so gallantly, that “Battle-hymn of the Republic”’, which she had caused to be chanted half a century before and still could accompany with a real breadth of gesture, her great clap of hands and indication of the complementary step, on the triumphant line, ‘Be swift my hands to welcome him, be jubilant my feet!’ (LCA, p. 176).

James’s return to Cambridge, Boston and New England restored him to a past which is identifiably American, one of a number of events which would lead him, in the later autobiographical writing, to re-enact scenes from childhood as well as narrating the motives and emotions of that earlier self. The American Journal II, covering the period of 11 December 1904 to March 1905, coincides in its starting date with his arrival in Cambridge and Boston. It offers remarkable insights into the intimate detail of James’s experience, pushing open figurative doors, crossing bridges avoided in The American Scene. What he there describes as if he were some relic of a forgotten era in the ‘antediluvian’ times of the ‘fifties, sixties, seventies’ (AS, p. 221) is recorded in the Journal as intensely felt and still living. He confesses his fear of ‘going to smash on the rock of biography’ (CN, p. 241) which explains why, in The American Scene, he stops at the anonymous door of the Fields or chooses not to cross the figurative bridge to speak to John Gray. The trope suggests, not a fear of confronting some earlier self in an act of retrospection, but, rather, the dangers of wrecking the consistency of this cultural critique. In practice, of course, The American Scene is an extended elaboration of subjectivity, of intimate pleasures as well as rationalized disappointments, of revelation hinted at and identity characterized, though without the naming of names. James’s discourse constantly restrains revelation, hinting at associations and significances which become sidelined in some elaboration of an ‘impression’. In helping construct the James of 1904, how he feels about his self of forty years earlier and how he shapes the narrative of The American Scene, the notebook is an invaluable document. The model for a desirable masculinity in the Civil War tales was Oliver Wendell Holmes, like James the son of a distinguished

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New England family. He is mentioned only once in The American Scene, in a list of those distinguished ‘ghosts’ who visited the Fields in Charles Street. He rose to become Supreme Court Justice, but in the 1860s had aspired to be a man of letters. Yet the story which James tells himself in the notebook, however revised by age and hindsight and conferring of coherence upon experience (as in the liberties of revision James would take with other people’s letters13), presents a much more profoundly moving portrait. Whatever the realities of the 1860s, there can be no uncertainty about James’s emotions of 1905 in this document written as much solely for himself as is possible. Though he had always compulsively requested the destruction of any personal papers, this is an item which, as Leon Edel says, ‘death had prevented him from destroying’ (CN, p. ix). There the romantic, infatuated power of James’s attachment to this older, more deeply experienced man is undeniable. Alone and exhausted after what had become a relentless lecture circuit and gathering of impressions, resting on the Pacific West Coast forty years later, he can recall ‘still, after such a lifetime’ the sense of ‘particular little thrills and throbs and daydreams’ of one day, in Boston. He feels it a moment of indulgence, almost deferred self-confession, which demands secrecy and privacy of which he must ever remind himself: ‘I can’t help, either, just touching with my pen-point (here, here, only here) the recollection of that (probably August) day when I went up to Boston’ (CN, p. 239). It is a silent moment of physical intensity denoted by the pen with which he writes and which emphasizes his point – quite distinct from the pacing figure whose dictating voice inscribed most of his late fiction, to be typed out with a ‘fierce legibility’ (CN, p. xv). This moment of writing is as secret as the remembered occasion itself. His friend is in London and he calls on Wendell’s mother – ‘that house (passed, never, since, without the sense)’ – and hears of his ‘success and felicity, and vibrated so with the wonder and romance and curiosity and dim weak tender (oh, tender!) envy of it, that my walk up the hill, afterwards, up Mount Vernon St. and probably to Athenaeum was all coloured and gilded, and humming with it, and the emotion, exquisite of its kind, so remained with me that I always think of that occasion, that hour, as a sovereign contribution to the germ of that inward romantic principle which was to determine, so much later on (ten years!), my own vision-haunted migration’. James refers to his own artistic hopes and his destined move to England, but the exclamatory prose, the underlinings and capitalizations, the absorption in a specific day and a place which has been transformed by heightened feeling, signify the excesses of romantic love.14 Often, of course, James invests his own creativeness with an erotic power, so that it is not surprising to find him celebrating the promise of a literary life in similar terms. But it seems too that he now interprets that decision to leave America in 1869 as a tender re-enactment of part of the beloved’s life. He still recalls his former rapt

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imagining of Wendell’s ‘1st flushed and charming visit to England’ (CN, p. 239) in terms of a longing, a physical infatuation.15 Though the remembered scenes of Cambridge and Boston celebrate the pleasures of vocation and the romantic allure of a distant beloved, at least in the privacy of the notebook, the public text of The American Scene, with its enigmatic allusions to ‘merciless memories’, touches on the more harrowing repercussions of returning to a familiar and family location.16 The cruel side of retrospection is located for James in a specific site and time. On the Cambridge side of the Charles River, standing on a bluff by the side of Mount Auburn, he looks across to the Boston shore and Soldiers’ Field. Without expanding on those ‘bristling’ memories, he mentions the ‘many-mouthed uproar’ of an ‘intercollegiate game of football’ (AS, pp. 68–9), though he reaches out a hand to ‘the very genius of the spot’, J. R. Lowell, and recalls W. D. Howells and their Sunday afternoon walks (AS, p. 71). The elegiac detail of season and the landscape of Cambridge Cemetery, specific and simple, prepare for the conclusion of this New England chapter, yet it seems to hint at something other as well – the death of family and the America of his memories: 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. Just opposite, at a distance, beyond the river and its meadows, the white face of the great empty Stadium stared at me, as blank as a rising moon – with Soldiers’ Field squaring itself like some flat memorial slab that waits to be inscribed (AS, pp. 68–9).17

The origins for this beautiful, bleak landscape, which seems to signify the moment of a simpler, earlier America, a tabula rasa conveying no message defined by culture or ethnicity, are to be found in two passages of the notebook. The first specifies its peculiarly American character, ‘the terrible, deadly, pure polar pink that shows behind American winter woods’ (CN, p. 240), and its undisguised, fearsome strangeness. The second remarks the revealing harshness of the winter sun and, like the first, registers a more deathly perspective and the pathos of the landscape’s sudden exposure, an insight repeated in The American Scene’s description of New England’s picturesque villages: ‘The snow, the sunshine, light up and pauperize all the wooden surfaces, all the mere paint and pasteboard paltriness. The one fine thing are the winter sunsets, the blood on the snow, the pink crystal of the west, the wild frankness, wild sadness (?) – so to speak – of the surrender.’ In this elegiac mood he laments dead literary friends, Lowell and George du Maurier, and days ‘bathed, bathed in a bitter-sweet of ghostliness’ (CN, pp. 242, 240), thinking, unaccountably as he says, of a happy trip to Whitby on the Yorkshire coast.18 Beyond his subjective application of the scene to mortality and the events of his own life, James’s meditation with its anthropomorphic ten-

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dency embraces the country itself, the beauty and sacrificial blood of sunset, the ‘surrender’ of the chillingly ‘wild’ country. The conviction, however evasive, of a soft spot, as it were, for Cambridge, lies in a figurative medium between extremes of aggression and submissiveness: ‘the Cambridge tendresse stands in the path like a waiting lion – or, more congruously, like a cooing dove that I shrink from scaring away’ (CN, p. 239). In this anxiety at the paradox of a forbidding but shrinking ‘tendresse’ as he stands in Cambridge Cemetery, he confronts his deceased family, accumulating ‘the never-to-be-lost memory of that evening hour’, by the ‘unspeakable group of graves’ which hold his mother, father, sister Alice, and a young child of William’s. In this writer who indefatigably finds the appropriate nuance, thus releasing the ‘unspeakable’, such painful intimacies have no place in The American Scene, yet the episode marks the reason for his coming and a reassurance that (having ignored William’s wellintentioned advice) he was right to return. Even here, as he rests and recollects on the Californian coast months later, the impossibility of reliving the experience relegates him to an attendant role; its fragile, untouchable state allows him only to follow up with a string of energetic assertions reflecting on his conflicted emotions: But I can’t go over this – I can only, oh, so gently, so tenderly, brush it and breathe upon it – breathe upon it and brush it. It was the moment; it was the hour, it was the blessed flood of emotion that broke out at the touch of one’s sudden vision and carried me away … I seemed then to know why I had come … It made everything right … Everything was there, everything came; the recognition, stillness, the strangeness, the pity and the sanctity and the terror, the breath-catching passion and the divine relief of tears (CN, p. 240).

This valedictory ritual for his closest family members as well as ‘the still-living vividness of 23 years ago’ – the period of his parents’ deaths and his previous stay in New England – involves James’s own past and his American self. This notebook is called, in James’s own hand, ‘Journal III’; the author, indicated in another hand, is referred to as ‘H. James Jr’,19 as if restored in this American homecoming to his original place within the family hierarchy. That Cambridge path which troubles him with its contrasting dangers is reminiscent of the first canto of Dante’s Inferno where the poet’s allegorical way is blocked by a she-wolf, a lion and a leopard. Indeed, moving from the mortal to the divine, the notebook scene, invoking a European perspective, contains a quotation from Dante, William’s ‘inspired transcript, on the exquisite little Florentine urn’ containing Alice’s ashes. He quotes from memory (and with a little inaccuracy20) lines from Canto X of the Paradiso: ‘ed essa da martiro / e da essilio venne a questa pace’.

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The sainted soul, ‘l’anima santa’, has finally found peace from martyrdom and exile in this canto which invites the reader to look upwards – ‘leva dunque, lettore … meco la vista’ – and turns from the darkness of the world and politics to the brightly shining dwelling of those souls in Paradise who have knowledge of God. Dante refers to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which mixes Christian truths with Classical terms in the soul’s conversation with Lady Philosophy, an appropriate choice of text, perhaps, given the religious eclecticism of the James family. Alice died in London in March 1892 with James in close attendance; in 1891–2 a three-volume translation of Dante was published by James’s old Cambridge friend, Charles Eliot Norton. More than ten years after Alice’s death William’s ‘divine gift’ of these lines takes James ‘so at the throat by its penetrating rightness, that it was as if one sank down on one’s knees in a kind of anguish of gratitude before something for which one had waited with a long, deep ache’. Alice’s own long ‘ache’, her cancer, ‘this unholy granite substance in my breast’,21 became her project, to be compared with the productions of Henry and William.22 A few years later, in September 1910, James, the last remaining sibling, would return to this spot once again for the burial of this ‘ideal Elder Brother’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 561) on his own final visit to America. Even here, in the privacy and grief of his own notebook, James raises the perpetual question of creativeness and its relation to life’s unforgiving progressions; against such odds the act of inscription has become futile. In the face of such implacability the pen finds itself finally overwhelmed: But why do I write of the all unutterable and the all abysmal? Why does my pen not drop from my hand on approaching the infinite pity and tragedy of all the past? It does, poor helpless pen, with what it meets of the ineffable, what it meets of the cold Medusa-face of life, of all the life lived, on every side. Basta, basta! (CN, p. 240).

Yet if the mechanics of writing fail him, James may comfort himself with the receptive and varied resources of ‘the heart’. Resting now in the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego in March 1905, he records that he has been unable to keep up with his ‘impressions’ of that long winter, ‘but the history is written in my troubled and anxious, my always so strangely more or less aching, doubting, yearning, yet also more or less triumphant, or at least uplifted, heart’ (CN, p. 237). Committed to his own past and history, and to those beloved dead who inhabit his memories, this survivor is, as he says, ‘vision-haunted’, conscious of his own mortality: ‘Oh, strange little intensities of history, of ineffaceability; oh, delicate little odd links in the long chain, kept unbroken for the fingers of one’s tenderest touch! Sanctities, pieties, treasures, abysses!’ (CN, p. 239). Though the pen has found its limitations, unable to influence the intractable conditions of the ‘life lived’, James’s relations with his creativeness are more enduring. It is affectionately embodied as a friendly, all-observing spirit, some-

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times addressed as ‘mon bon’ – dear fellow, old chap – who will never desert him. ‘… I can only invoke my familiar demon of patience, who always comes, doesn’t he?, when I call. He is here with me in front of this green Pacific – he sits close and I feel his soft breath, which cools and steadies and inspires, on my cheek. Everything sinks in: nothing is lost; everything abides and fertilizes and renews its golden promise’ (CN, p. 237). This, then, is the conspiring genius, in the most intimate relations, a projection of the self on to a companion infinitely adaptable and loving, his breath felt on the cheek.23 He can chat with ‘caro mio’ (CN, p. 190) – ‘causons, causons, mon bon’ – ‘my poor blest old Genius [who] 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’ (CN, pp. 261, 268). James will return to his British home with this accumulation of material whose depths he will mine in comfort and familiarity. The languorous if disturbing anticipation of penetration ‘deep and far’ into the riches of revitalized memory (a characteristically late-Jamesian figure of suggestiveness, a trope to be found in some of the fiction too), is imagined partly as a sanctifying ritual, partly in a richly endowed fantasy of anal eroticism: with closed eyes of deep and grateful longing when, in the full summer days of L[amb H[ouse], my long dusty adventure over, I shall be able to [plunge] my hand, my arm, in, deep and far, and up to the shoulder – into the heavy bag of remembrance – of suggestion – of imagination – of art – and fish out every little figure and felicity, every little fact and fancy that can be to my purpose. These things are all packed away, now, thicker than I can penetrate, deeper than I can fathom, and there let them rest for the present, in their sacred cool darkness, till I shall let in upon them the mild still light of dear old L[amb H[ouse] – in which they will begin to gleam and glitter and take form like the gold and jewels of a mine (CN, p. 237).24

Out of this obscure bag of dull-seeming material he will, magician-like, in this act of darkness with closed eyes, restore it to its real, scintillating beauty. Like the kindly girl in a favourite Perrault fairy-tale, ‘Les Fées’,25 he will speak diamonds and pearls. These thoughts, with their pleasurable, almost mystic applications, have been prompted by a different American scene whose messages, rather than hanging in the sky or speaking from a building, indicate a solely internalized network of significance. Exposed in Cambridge to sites and scenes of family interment and fatigued at crossing the continent, he considers questions of mortality alongside the assurances of creativity, seemingly infinite in its ‘golden promise’. In a typically self-deprecating, apologetic reference to his earliest writing years, Cambridge stands now for ‘that pathetic, heroic little personal prime of my own’. He relishes the excess and ambiguity of the favoured term, ‘unspeakable’, in a picturesque image crammed with phrases where things related to him seem incurably abject: ‘my poor little personal C. of the far-off unspeakable past years, hangs

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there behind, like a pale pathetic ghost, hangs there behind, fixing me with tender, pleading eyes, eyes of such exquisite pathetic appeal and holding up the silver mirror, just faintly dim, that is like a sphere peopled with the old ghosts’. Yet however reductive of person and place this retrospection, the recorded memories of the notebook, still breathless and intoxicated, create a past both vivid and romantic, belying that modest characterization. Such is James’s ambiguity that his ‘initiation première (the divine, the unique)’ in the years 1865–6 – ‘the unforgettable gropings and findings and sufferings and strivings and play of sensibility and of inward passion’ (CN, p. 238) – can be read directly as erotic experience26 or as a figuratively expressed reference to early creative development. Some late notes, ‘The K.B. Case and Mrs. Max’, which, much changed, would be developed for The Ivory Tower, combine the sensual and the creative as the sixty-six-year-old James recognizes in himself a burlesque re-embodiment of Keats’s young hero in The Eve of St Agnes, secretly watching, not the chaste Madeline undress, but the promise of his own creativeness: ‘Any way I want to see; but if the way that has begun to glimmer and flush before me does appear to justify itself, what infinite concomitant advantages and blessings and inspirations will then be involved in it! Porphyro grows faint really as he thinks of them’ (CN, p. 259). The return to Boston and Cambridge – places less aggressively transformed perhaps than New York (though Cambridge had been little more than a village in the sixties) – invites a further exploration of the divisions between a distant past and the present. A more uncertain and hesitant James is revealed, tentative about disturbing memories of the most romantic significance, ambiguously poised between erotic gratification and literary achievement. The location accentuates the James preoccupied with privacy – indeed his appreciation of the enclosure of Harvard Yard could be read as an emblem of confinement, distinction between the public and the private. And, more intimately, he here considers mortality as he wanders through Cambridge Cemetery, his only support his pen and his companion genius, both subject to human frailty.

4 ASKING ‘A S FEW QUESTIONS AS POSSIBLE’ IN ARCADIAN NEW ENGLAND

The journeys and visits to the New England states of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, which ranged through landscapes of autumnal profusion as well as more austere coastal regions, reveal James as both passive observer of society and culture and, conversely, as an apologist for the mid-century civilization in which he spent his late adolescence. The autobiographies realize the introspective weight of these landscapes in greater detail, but in the episodic drama of The American Scene, the New England essays reflect upon choices in relation to his writing of himself. In Jerome Bruner’s analysis of the autobiographical process derived from Kenneth Gergen’s theorizing of the ‘construction of Self ’, we ‘envision alternatives’ in retrospect and speculate upon other possibilities of being and behaviour. In the simplest division we may be ‘“creatures of history”’, that is, in upholding the status quo as a ‘guardian of permanence’, as well as ‘autonomous agents’, more freely expressing an independence of motives.1 Within the powerfully shifting perspectives of James’s prose, he moves between these alternatives, seemingly a part of a lost mid-century society, fiercely critical of contemporary values, and irrepressibly attached to his own creative ‘autonomy’. In practice he blurs such divisions, conflating, for instance, what he regards as American society’s nineteenth-century innocence with that of New England and, indeed, with his own youthful state. Insofar as it has a distinctive feature, the highly subjective yet generalizing discourse shapes itself around premises which are then subject to qualification or question. The central figurative hyperbole of Arcadia as a symbol of the region’s unspoilt tranquillity is rapidly interrogated and undermined. Yet at other times the noted ‘impression’ can signal, in subjective terms, James’s repossession of America as he subversively (on occasion) examines versions of artistic tradition or the life of the man of letters, or translates cultural bastions of masculinity into objects for aesthetic consideration. As the continued tropes of messages and inscriptions for interpretation spell out for us, James is reading America, recording its updated condition, and writing his own revised relations with it. – 50 –

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As he leaves behind urban America, the landscape serves James’s own ends in exemplifying in a strongly European spirit the workings of ‘style’ in pictorial or compositional terms. He travels through upstate New York and the Hudson River, as if retreating from modernity, considering the landscape to be best seen not from the train of ‘our detestable age’ but, with a ‘peculiar note of romance’ from a river-steamer, offering a ‘picture’, ‘a constant combination of felicities’ (AS, pp. 148–9), an illustrative model of what James calls ‘style’. From long ago, ever since he had crossed ‘that bridge over to Style’ in the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon to breathe in ‘a general sense of glory’ (Aut, p. 346), such great abstractions had been founded upon a specific, even spectacular example; here, in America, it is expressed in the sublimity of a natural scene, the wonder of its composition translated into the form of a French painting. The view from the train window becomes the framed picture, full of ‘vaguenesses’ and ‘blurs’. It diminishes the particular and the detailed, and, in ‘a mist of premature spring heat’ offers a shimmering ‘glamour’ (AS, p. 149). On a consequent ‘memorable pilgrimage’ to West Point, America’s most prestigious military academy overlooking the Hudson, the wet May day becomes a painting, letting loose ‘the whole procession of storm-effects; the raw green of wooded heights and hollows was only everywhere rain-brightened, the weather playing over it all day as with some great grey water-colour brush’. The scene becomes an example of ‘the grand style’, ‘all simplifying and ennobling’, free of detail or compromising ‘accent’. The didactic voice or ‘genius of the scene’ will later invoke the great landscape names of Claude and Turner, slyly considering them wasted on the ‘thin rivers of France and Italy’. The lesson ‘to take home’, expressed in the most emphatic and earnest way, is clear: ‘“No, you shan’t have accent, because accent is, at the best, local and special, and might here by some perversity – how do I know after all? – interfere. I want you to have something unforgettable, and therefore you shall have type – yes, absolutely have type, and even tone, without accent.”’ Such is the ‘pure poetry of the impression’ that the ‘School of the Soldier’ loses its military bearing and, indeed, its masculine associations give way within a transformation of some erotic indulgence to assume conventionally feminine qualities, conveying ‘shyness, the air of conscious evasion and escape’, its ‘prose … washed away’: ‘I shall recall it in the future much less as the sternest, the world over, of all the seats of Discipline, than as of some great Corot-composition of young, vague, wandering figures in splendidly-classic shades’ (AS, pp. 149–51). Under the mantle of art, the young soldier seen more intimately and closely by James elsewhere as a bronzed object of desire is transformed to an item of decorative detail, part of a compositional effect. The reading of this scene is pointedly aesthetic in illustrating nature’s replication of art and the achievements of ‘Style’. With an element of self-referential irony, the occasional figure of the man of letters has appeared as an ambiguous

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mix of pathos and comedy attached to the culture of twentieth-century America. A little further down the Lower Hudson Valley, ‘Sunnyside’, the home of Washington Irving, offers James a more concrete basis for considering the role of the writer, and, implicitly, in this self-searching critique of America, the status of his own history. The preparatory scene, a ‘golden Sunday’ on the Hudson, reiterates the national associations of the experience as James admires an ‘old American country-house’, ‘old afternoons suffused with … languor … under the murmur of American trees and by the lap of American streams’. It is the scene of one of James’s earliest stories, ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’, yet now, forty years later, possessing ‘a shimmer of association’ that cannot be ‘reduced to terms’, it has become a more complex place containing ‘some sense of legend, of aboriginal mystery’ which applies, as we shall see, to the novelist’s reading of the continent, as well as to his private ‘case’ and his feelings about the landscape which he left. His own past, however nostalgically recalled, is characterized as a semisomnolent, end-of-season state of inanition, his impressions melting into ‘the general iridescence of a past of Indian summers hanging about mild ghosts half asleep, in hammocks, over still milder novels’ (AS, pp. 153–4). With its continuous present held open by participles, modestly deferent absence of agents or grammatical subjects, and a tendency towards all-inclusive, non-specific action, James narrates his earlier self, allowing the scene to form with minimal direction, indeed, without introducing himself. Mildness characterizes the mood and landscape as well as the portrait of Washington Irving; ‘Sunnyside’ is ‘a perfect treasure of mild moralities’. This man of letters, one of America’s earliest, most cherished literary figures, is hedged round with limitations, aside from the fiction itself. Despite the proximity of the road to Albany, ‘bristling now with the cloud-compelling motor’, and the railtrack just down the hill, the cottage possesses something of ‘the quite indefinable air of the little American literary past’. James carefully applies that ‘caressing diminutive’ to the simplicity and charm of Sunnyside, occupied long before the ‘loss of leisure’ which afflicts the impossible present. Modernity, seen as an amalgam of commercialism and sentimentality, ‘with its pockets full of money and its conscience full of virtue, its heart really full of tenderness, has seated itself there under pretext of guarding the shrine’, reducing Irving and Sunnyside to a tourist site: the self-effacing place is ‘doomed’: ‘the primitive cell has seen itself encompassed, in time, by a temple of many chambers, all dedicated to the history of the hermit’ (AS, pp. 154–5). Modernity simply of the present and paying attention to its heritage cannot win. It has a message beyond this, however, ‘its very most interesting message’, as James emphatically calls it, which speaks through the site’s modesty, the ‘small incommodious study’ and ‘limited library’, and on behalf of ‘the man of letters of the unimproved age’, exposes the complicating limitations of the present. Given

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the intricate symbolism of houses which James invokes elsewhere as vehicles for aesthetic theorizing or psychic self-exploration, Sunnyside embodies windowless and sanctified mediocrity, a condition without potential for dangerous enlightenment, ‘the identity of the original modest house, the shrine within the gilded shell … religiously preserved’. ‘Wolfert’s Roost’, as it is referred to, reviving Irving’s first name for the house, after its original owner,2 offers ‘the last faint echo of a felicity forever gone’, as James works into his recorded visit references to ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. Whatever the broader international dimension of Irving’s life, this affectionate portrait of a local man of letters accentuates the parochial and bland, the writer’s ‘command of all the mildness of his life, of his pleasant powers and his ample hours’ (AS, pp. 155–7). Such rural locations, no less than America’s urban scenes, carry a complex message for James, in relation to his national identity and in their composing of aesthetic or historic form. His arrival in New Hampshire, however, was effected effortlessly in ‘a quick transition’ which grants him a sudden panoramic view of the state. Like a mythical hero he ‘wakes up’ there ‘in the New Hampshire mountains, in the deep valleys and the wide woodlands, on the forest-fringed slopes, the far-seeing crests of the high places, and by the side of the liberal streams and the lonely lakes’. In this refreshed state, even the particularity of memory attaching to the locations of his youth is diminished; the horizons are distant and uncrowded, the ‘provisional’ nature of urban life and development cannot intrude to introduce any need to calculate ‘the millions spent’, and human life is incidental. That Keatsian awakening to a new world coincides with the Arcadian allusions scattered through these pages, though the questions necessarily arising from a contemporary perspective quickly threaten the likelihood of that rural idyll. Having introduced an impossible standard James is then free to argue with and qualify it, though this dialectical process counters his early, self-conscious premise, the primary condition attached to Arcadian tenancy: ‘When you wander about in Arcadia you ask as few questions as possible. That is Arcadia in fact, and questions drop, or at least get themselves deferred and shiftlessly shirked’ (AS, pp. 13–14).3 The impression is, of course, a ‘fine illusion’, but for a month of Autumn, as he notes ‘the mild September glow’, it continues to be ‘strangely sweet’. The ‘connotation’ is not merely Arcadian, but ‘delicately Arcadian’ ( James’s italics), a refinement even on classical perfection. And, having dismissed the mundane rationality of questions, he must nevertheless ask, with allusions to the literature and decorative art-objects of some classical age which constitute undeniably complete and old versions of a golden era, how the rural scene before him refers itself consistently to ‘the idyllic type in its purity’, suggesting ‘the Arcadia of an old tapestry, an old legend, an old love-story in fifteen volumes, one of those of Mademoiselle de Scudéri’. In this synthesizing of the charm of New England

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landscape, James, as with the rain-washed effects of the Hudson River, draws the general, characteristic qualities which transcend the ‘accent’ of incidental detail. Yet though he may scan the landscape expansively, admiring the ‘outlooks to purple crag and blue horizon’, the evidence of more recent and tragic American history, defeated lives of New Englanders or a ‘rude forefather who had lost patience with his fate’, ‘the crumbled, lonely chimney-stack, the overgrown threshold, the dried-up well, the cart-track vague and lost’, remains. Given his later comments upon the insecure structure of this rural society, the echoes of eighteenth-century melancholy at such signs of dereliction so reminiscent of Oliver Goldsmith4 are unsurprising, but they are incidental, meagre ‘notes’ and thus hardly ‘interfere … with the queer other, the larger, eloquence that one kept reading into the picture’. The complications of merely human endeavours may be forgotten on ‘hillsides’ or ‘rocky eminences’ or in ‘wild orchards’ in this interpretation of ‘the picture’ so that other mixed and more exclusive associations may appear ‘Sicilian, Theocritan, poetic, romantic, academic, from their not bearing the burden of too much history’ (AS, pp. 13–15). He cannot avoid seeing the excess and waste of windfall fruit, ‘“run down” from neglect and shrunken from cheapness’, whilst the unfallen apples with ‘their young brightness in the blue air’ suggest curiously, to James’s eyes, ‘strings of strange-coloured pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you note their manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gaiety’. Once again, though, he seeks refuge in a carefully sustained metaphor of Arcadian bounty. Italy has its olive trees while New England offers up its apples in ‘the easiest, most familiar sacrifice to Pomona’, the goddess of orchards and fruitfulness. James savours such profusion and, reminded of Spenserian or Miltonic versions of pastoral scenes, imagines that they ask to be praised only by ‘the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe’ (AS, p. 17). Within these allusions to some of the most artificial topics of literary tradition, the benign figure of Autumn forms the subject of an imagined painting spontaneously and naturally composed. A ‘particular light’ cast for James near Chocorua Mountain (where his brother, William, had a country house) ‘an irresistible spell, bathed the picture in the confessed resignation of early autumn, the charming sadness that resigned itself with a silent smile’. Feeling himself ‘in presence as of a world created, a stage set’, James confesses to a ‘positive wantonness’ of ‘appreciation’ as he registers the spirit of the season within an allegorical medium, reminiscent of some mid-Victorian painting. In this land of ‘high places’, ‘deep places’, ‘lost trails’ and ‘rock-roughened pastures’, when the afternoon ‘lingers’ over hidden ponds in a lightly figurative and melancholy way, autumn becomes a woman in a moment of narrative elaboration embodying a cautionary message of the kind beloved of Victorian genre painters: ‘the season itself seemed to bend as a young bedizened, a slightly melodramatic mother, before taking some guilty flight, hangs over the crib of her sleeping child’ (AS, pp. 15–16). By con-

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ceding the ‘slightly melodramatic’ pose of personified Autumn, James admits to the sentimental dangers of such imagined pathos whilst finding ‘elegance in the commonest objects’. James goes on to scan the landscape in figurative terms ranging from the homely to the gothic, assigning it credit for design and arrangement, rocks, for instance, placed to suggest the ‘furniture of a drawing room’. In a ‘drizzle of forest light’ the objects of conventionally romantic landscape, the ‘great boulders’, ‘pulpit-stones’, ‘couchant and rampant beasts’ ‘isolated cliffs and lichened cathedrals’ become domesticated, in keeping with ‘New Hampshire sociability’, items within a room exemplifying Edwardian décor, ‘sweet old stones’ with a ‘surface of grey velvet’, ‘scattered wild apples … like figures in a carpet’. Responsible for all this ‘poetry’ is the busy figure of Autumn itself, now transformed into a male artist, ‘the imprisoned painter, the Bohemian with a rusty jacket, who had already broken out with palette and brush’. The scene recalls the energetic working methods and milieu of James’s old friend John Singer Sargent, as he imagines Autumn, ‘dabbing’ his colours on the landscape: ‘a solitary maple on a wood-side flames in single scarlet’, recalling incongruously ‘the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes’(AS, p. 17). The subject matter of this sophisticated tableau suggests the Edwardian opulence of colour and surface in a Sargent group-portrait. Does this discourse characterized by insistent, overwrought impressions and willed interpretive acts indicate what James calls elsewhere an ‘evasion of the actual’? Landscape seen through a haze of eclectic European culture? In part, yes – his prose in all its proliferation crowds out, or silences the simple features of landscape and its otherness. As a strategy though, James’s arranging and anecdotal approach, however attention-catching, offers drama and animation, the idiosyncratic viewpoint of a shaping vision which constructs a version, however inescapably Jamesian, of rural New England. With these references to the fine arts, genre paintings, portraits of the beau monde, Edwardian décor, classical pastoral, James registers the rural America of his own early years. He had never, as we are told in A Small Boy and Others, been allowed to follow the injunction, publicized by Horace Greely, to go ‘West’ for adventure, his parents thinking it too dangerous, and even here, in the tamed countryside of New Hampshire, he reveals at this later stage of life a seeming inability to access the simplicities of rural life. Some of the page headings indicate further regression into cultural and social isolation in the face of alien rural lives which exemplify ‘The Looseness of Appearances’ or ‘The Absence of Forms’ (AS, pp. 23, 25). The ‘sordid ugliness and shabbiness’ of certain farms is relieved only occasionally by ‘the matter of fresh paint or a swept dooryard’, though by his choice of the uniquely American ‘dooryard’5 James ironically and unconsciously reclaims an aspect of his native

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identity. The human lives and activity on these farms, ‘the teams, the carts, the conveyances … the sallow, saturnine natives in charge of them, the enclosures, the fences, the gates, the wayside “bits”’ (AS, p. 23) speak of neglect and hardship. ‘There are no “kinds” of people; there are simply people’ who ‘invest themselves for you in the grey truth that they don’t go to the public house’ (AS, p. 45). Yet in regretting such impoverishment of manners and spirit, indeed, the absence of social mix, he invokes an unexpected rural sociological model which seems to owe most to English eighteenth-century literature as illustrated in the novels of Fielding or even a young Jane Austen. He attributes the prevailing ugliness and observed lack of ‘form’ to the ‘two great factors of the English landscape, the squire and the parson’ (AS, p. 23). This nostalgic, contrasting vision of England, however slender its foundation, suggests James’s cultural limitations, a cosmopolitan reluctance to interrogate the motives for any loss of Arcadian poise. The picturesque illusion is preserved only if the New England village is kept at a distance and limited to generic significance within a larger, pleasing composition. Ugliness ‘melts’ and ‘drops away’ when the perspective embraces ‘horizons that recalled at their will the Umbrian note and the finer drawing’ (AS, p. 43) and the particular and individual are transcended: ‘It was enough that the white village or the painted farm could gleam from afar, on the faintly purple slope, like a thing of mystery or of history’. The painted village street may, as he suggests, be a ‘whited sepulchre’ (AS, p. 46), though to ‘the casual eye’ this can remain uncertain. He concludes, nevertheless, that the ‘stout human experiment’ of rural life in New Hampshire has ‘broken down’, and the sad message is ‘written over’ the region: ‘everywhere legible was the hard little historic record of agricultural failure and defeat’ (AS, p. 21). Even in the beautiful valley of the Saco river,6 the message for this ‘story-seeker’ (AS, p. 35) is simpler, more optimistic, and rooted in the past. It is ‘the story told at the lighted windows of the inns … above all, of advantages impartially diffused and shared’, reflecting an inescapable tradition of community and participation, however ‘penally, clean and bare’ the setting, ‘the most direct message of the life displayed’ (AS, pp. 30–1). Yet such an insight, gained in solitude, contains pathos and isolation, the observer standing outside in the darkness, cut off from another section of American society. The New England village, seen from afar as well as revealed in wintry squalor, acts as a locus for unresolved feelings concerning rural America, what it signifies, and how, more introspectively, James regards his role as observer and his limits of interpretation. In these pages he (uncharacteristically) relies upon the most condensed epithet, the most throwaway line, as if uncertain of his critique, or at best of how he arrives at what continue to be intuitive evaluations. He designates the ‘New England village in its most exemplary state’ as ‘“elm-shaded”’; with this ‘you have said so much … that little else remains’. As with the undermining of Washington Irving and Sunnyside as tourist curiosities, James, in thus compact-

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ing their uniformity ‘from May to November’, offers the reader a strategy for a safe, bland future in which he guarantees that s/he will be ‘spared all shocks of surprise and saved any extravagance of discrimination’. The comic irony applies not only to such rural limitations which are unlikely to trouble the reader, but to James’s own characteristic discourse whose surprises and extravagance of discrimination constitute its determining features. With the straight street and white-painted woodwork, ‘the great verdurous vista, the high canopy of meeting branches, has the air of consciously playing the trick and carrying off the picture’. The ‘goodly elms’ speak and indiscreetly remind him that if he returns in winter the deception will be exposed and the ‘naked glare’ show up the ‘dead and dingy’ reality. Best perhaps not to return and let ‘the picture’ hang ‘undisturbed in your gallery’, placed ‘among your best mementos of the great autumnal harmony’ (AS, pp. 38–40).7 Such excess of simplicity erodes the individual impression with hints, even, despite the archness of tone, of violent death, when he notices the tall village church, ‘pretty as a monstrous Dutch toy’. It remains uncommunicative, awaiting a confirming meaning, occupying some imagined space in a decorative medium. The building cannot ‘testify’ more than ‘some large white card, embellished with a stencilled border, on which a message or a sentence, an invitation or a revelation, might be still to be inscribed’ (AS, p. 44), and it may be secular, even frivolous in content. The picturesque main street is imagined in its wintry shabbiness and futility in scenes enlisted to illustrate the dispiriting bleakness – or ‘flatness’, as James calls it – of the lives led here. Its ‘railway-crossing’, a ‘localization of possible death and destruction’, is controlled by the bossy, bullying train. The conviction, however precarious, remains (or ‘sprouts in that soil’) that this village life is the ‘appointed paradise and sphere’ of ‘“the common man” and the common woman’, but in its exploitation of a ‘monotony of acquiescence’ imposes ‘the abeyance … of any wants, any tastes, any habits, any traditions but theirs’. Without allowance for the ‘uncommon’, progress, the bureaucratic state summed up by the ‘bullying railway’ which can order people ‘off their own decent avenue’ will lead you (and James has introduced this pronominal shift to include us) to ask ‘“Is that all?”’ (AS, p. 44) – presumably echoing his own disappointment, and, in terms of his own discourse, becoming shockingly direct. James withdraws into a retrogressive, class-based social taxonomy marked by a page heading raising ‘The Question of Manners’, exemplified by that complaint about the absence of ‘“kinds” of people’ (AS, p. 45). He makes a brief concession to the grandeur of the Colonial Revival house of the unnamed magnate, Alfred A Pope, with its collection of Impressionist paintings which has the ‘effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning, between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanition’, a torpor presumably reached

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through cultural deprivation.8 The French paintings count as an ‘adventure’, one of perhaps ‘always possible adventures’ which he will allow to wait for him ‘over the land’ , p. 46). But leaving these aesthetic escapades and moving from ‘Manners’ to the corresponding ‘Question of Morals’, he repeats the idea that he has heard ‘portentously alluded to’ by some of the ‘sagacious’, namely, the misleading innocence of appearances in the ‘village street’ and America’s ‘positive primness’ in alluding to ‘“the great facts of life”’. There is no ‘bristling’ of James’s scene; truth grows inward rather than surfacing. The New England village in its painful openness remains inscrutable, ‘a scene peeled as bare of palpable pretext as the American sky is often peeled of clouds’. The flat prospect is rendered ‘“interesting”’ and ‘richer’ ‘under the smutch of imputation’ as he summons the possibility of hidden extremes of human suffering quite on the scale of ‘Cenci-drama, of monstrous legend, of old Greek tragedy’, replacing the ‘dire dreariness’ (AS, p. 47) of the appearances before him. The inveterate ‘story-seeker’ reverts to European models of cruelty and suffering for these speculative native tragedies, but this suppressed horror has a more subjective relation to the writer’s psychic history. The text has already established the New England landscape as a site which belongs to James’s own past and in this antithetical alternation between the beauties and progressiveness of recent art and the unspoken nightmares of outwardly unspectacular lives can be read a more personal message. ‘The Jolly Corner’ of 1908 will unmask the fearsome spectre of a consciousness of otherness, and release the menacing power of the alter ego, the latest in a series of fictive explorations of the dark mystery of personality. Under a page heading which signals ‘The Femininity of Nature’ James revises the land before him, ‘scrubby’ or ‘meagre’, into the ideal of the ‘feminine’, ‘mistress … of the feminine attitude and effect’. Under cover of a Browning trope of ‘Italy, thou woman-land!’, smiling at the ‘amusing coincidence’ of these New England states’ sharing of latitude with the Apennines, or ‘Tuscan or Umbrian forms’, he reaches the more serious stage of confronting his own American identity. The landscape has gender and you cannot ‘look out at certain hours … without feeling that the ground has quite gratefully borne you’ (AS, p. 19). The tender simplicities of this revelatory mother–son relationship, the wonder at such gendered virtues of ‘mild submission to your doing what you would with it’, are, for all their relevance to James’s psychic and emotional constitution, simply private affairs or indulgence, as he himself points out. They form part of a state which includes horror as well as filial composure. Aside from the personal resolution, in this society where ‘greasy green-backs’ prevail, nothing can be ‘done’ for this land in the public dimension. Yet for the individual who scans the autumn landscape it is clear that ‘something intrinsically lovable everywhere lurks’. He hears this ‘sweetness of voice’ all around, ‘diffused’, ‘confounding’, belonging to ‘a tribe of sons and daughters too numerous to be counted’ – as if,

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in the absence of society, he reclaims some naïve status derived from folk memory, an intuitive ear for the wisdom of dead native generations. What he hears is reassuring, yet wonderfully colloquial and understated: ‘There was a voice in the air, from week to week, a spiritual voice: “Oh, the land’s all right!”’ In contrast with the urban complications of contemporary America which would so disturb James, the message is poignantly simple; the land itself – ‘the poor dear land’ – as he hears ‘the blessed note’, ‘would beautifully “do”’ (AS, pp. 20–1). These places belong to ‘the other time’ – James’s plainest and most unpossessive allusion to his childhood. He wonders now at the gaps in his own earliest experience of places, heard of, but unknown, ‘many unveiled too briefly and too recently’ so that they have lived on, in memory, ‘as mere blank faces, round, empty, metallic, senseless disks dangling from familiar and reiterated names’ (AS, p. 52), small but disturbing symbols of incomprehensibility. The more accessible past which can be read is constructed on a rural America mediated through the tradition of the man of letters. The favoured scene – there is certainly one to which attaches ‘the memory of a characteristic perfection’ – is unpeopled. Staying at Chocorua, James sits ‘in a shallow cove, on a fallen log’, as if he is recalling Thoreau at Walden Pond. A thin web of contextualizing allusion which complicates the tranquillity of the scene reflects some reluctance to reclaim anything as sentimental as native roots or heritage. He cannot look at the evening sky without invoking in this ‘classic American temple’ with its ‘great straight pines’, Fenimore Cooper and ‘the cult of the Indian canoe’, or recalling Whitman’s favourite poet, W. C. Bryant, and his most famous lyric on ‘the immortalizable water-fowl’ (AS, p. 18). Having acknowledged these revered native priests (and their wood-notes) who embody a literature and a continent, he sees the lake scene before him as a re-enactment, with appropriate detail (sunset, evening star, lake surrounded by forest, a boat pulling out), of a picturesque scene of ‘the American landscape “school”, now as rococo as so many squares of ingenious wool-work’ – outmoded but imaginatively influential, ‘the remembered delight of our childhood’. There is no guarantee that present-day New England, ‘too often dusty or scrubby’, might not interject ‘some object at variance’ with the ‘glamour’ of this ‘school’, but for now the effect is sustained – a mood reliably available only in those mid-nineteenth-century compositions. In breaking the quasi-romantic idiom with his own stumbling admission of being momentarily lost for words, James introduces another illusion-disturbing form of modernity. He observes that the Wordsworthian skiff has reached its destination: ‘that boat across the water is safe … it puts out from the cove of romance, from the inlet of poetry, and glides straight over, with muffled oar, to the – well, to the right place’ (AS, p. 18). This place, somewhere other, we must infer to be an untroubled refuge, imaginatively associated with America’s past. In these rural scenes the simplicity of

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some of James’s key statements – the anticlimax of reaching ‘the right place’, ‘Is that all?’, when looking at the New England village, ‘the land’s all right’, it will ‘beautifully “do”’ – marks an almost conversational inconsequence within the late style, the vernacular allowed entry with an echo of the directness of American speech. In this simple familiarity the complex and shocking condition of twentieth-century America is, for the time, defused as James achieves a simpler contact with the ‘land’. There is further complication, of course, as emerges in the location itself which he would later refer to as ‘this strange sad rude spot’.9 The mountain under whose shadow William James’s country house lay, belongs to the ‘wild legend’ of a native American, Chocorua, who ‘avenged his son’s death on a family of settlers and was then pursued to the summit of the mountain that was later named for him. Before throwing himself to his death, he cast a curse on the white settlers and their farms. Chocorua’s curse was said to have caused pestilence and storms that destroyed the surrounding countryside and led to the abandonment of the smaller settlements.’10 James sketches in the historic myth of murder, cursing and suicide without pursuing its political or environmental implications. Attention remains fixed on the autumn landscape as he considers the adequacy of his own response. Looking upwards at Chocorua mountain, carrying ‘its grey head quite with the grandest air’, he reads there the answer ‘to any question, should any question insist’, hanging above the mountain’s ‘admirable silvered summit’. The question which arises from having ‘one’s head so easily turned’, as James punningly expresses it, concerns the accuracy of his judgment, the unavoidable subjectivity of his impression: ‘Did one by chance exaggerate, did one rhapsodize amiss?’ Had he lost touch with the countryside, ‘having happened to be deprived to excess … of naturalism in quantity’ (AS, p. 15)? It was too early for that other bigger question relating to the colonizing domination of a white technocracy to be asked. In contrast to the landscapes which invoke some historical dimension, or the remembered reading of an earlier American self, New England’s coast draws a different response and a corresponding network of aesthetic illustration. Cape Cod in its ‘supreme queerness’ (AS, p. 35) (referred to in The Bostonians as ‘the Italy, so to speak, of Massachusetts’11) seems to have no story at all to tell; in its simplicity and clearly divided vistas of land, sea and sky, it comes ‘under one’s hand’ so that ‘one could read into it other meanings without straining or disturbing it’. The coastal light effects, sharp horizons and fantastical tree-shapes offer ‘a delightful little triumph of “impressionism”’, or ‘a pendent, pictured Japanese screen or banner’ (AS, p. 34). The art-historical references precisely replicate the contemporary taste of Boston,12 but James in a modernist gesture moves forward (as happens elsewhere) to anticipate the eclipse of the representational. The landscape takes on the aesthetic value of a created artwork: without any anecdotal potential, it formulates its own compositional terms whereby the viewer

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registers absence rather than presence: ‘the constituted blankness was the whole business, and one’s opportunity was all, thereby, for a study of exquisite emptiness’. He notices a few artisans and school children on the waterside near Cotuit with its ‘woody, piney, pondy landscape, veined with blue inlets and trimmed … with blond beaches’, but it offers no more precise promise of narrative. No message has been inscribed upon the scene: ‘the remaining characters, on the sketchy page, were too few to form a word’. Yet the ‘impression made’ for ‘the charmed visitor’ is of ‘softness and sweetness’, contenting him with half-knowledge: ‘I had again to take it for a mystery’ (AS, pp. 35, 38). The other coastal location, Newport, Rhode Island, has a significant role in James’s past, specifically the early 1860s, when he and William had taken art lessons with William Morris Hunt, and enjoyed friendships with John La Farge and with their cousin Mary Temple – ‘early, ingenuous, infatuated days’ spent in a place which he had ‘known … too well’, and ‘loved … too much’. Like Walt Whitman, he prefers its ‘pretty native name’ of Aquidneck as a less utilitarian bureaucratic option to ‘an existence as Rhode Island practically monopolized by the State’ (AS, pp. 209–10), as if wanting to regress to some earlier more innocent condition sympathetic to the secrecies and freedoms he associates with his own youth. He recalls Newport’s ‘shallow Arcadian summer-haunted valleys’, with their ‘far away’, ‘lonely’, ‘almost hidden places’. It appears figuratively to him now as ‘some fine foreground in an old “line” engraving’ with a refined, antique association, yet, for once and briefly, James accedes to an autobiographical impulse as (in a correspondingly expansive idiom) he embraces ‘a whole world that called out to the long afternoons of youth, a world with its scale … measured and intended and happy, its detail … finished and pencilled and stippled (certainly for American detail!)’ (AS, p. 212). The impressions of Newport are invariably nostalgic, associated with important phases of his formative adolescent years, ‘one’s young simplicity’ (AS, p. 217), and the untroubled syntax reflects that security. The unexpected reference to ‘American detail’ points to the native cast of James’s feelings; experience figuratively transformed into a finelyexecuted landscape in the style of John La Farge. In keeping with its Arcadian associations, Newport is characterized as ‘a little bare, white, open hand, with slightly-parted fingers, for the observer with a presumed sense for hands to take or to leave’. The comic irony of those final options marks an astringency within what otherwise might become a sentimental idyll. This is a hand to be kissed and venerated, to be raised ‘delicately’ to the observer’s lips, who must not lose ‘the instinct of not shaking it too hard, and … above all of never putting it to any rough work’. It has the beauty and dignity of a detail from a Renaissance portrait, and demands a wrapt attention, ‘with the gracefully-spread fingers and the fine grain of skin … the dimples at the joints and the shell-like delicacy of the pink nails’; the ‘true lover’ would ‘take’ and ‘admire’ ‘the

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back of the hand’, with its ‘shy and subtle beauties, almost requiring, for justice, a magnifying-glass’. As with the flaws apparent in a modern-day Arcadia, such perfection is prone to abuse: its ‘shy sweetness’ has been ‘bedizened and bedevilled’ in the intervening years. With dark and comic bathos and a descent into the marketplace, James denounces past improprieties and rues the uncouth way in which this delicate hand has been ‘turned up on the chance of what might be “in” it’ (AS, pp. 210–11) (as also perhaps in the sense of ‘what’s in it for me?’). Being found empty, it has later been violated, as James quite simply remarks: ‘they had begun, from far back, to put things into it, things of their own, and of all sorts, and of many ugly, and of more and more expensive, sorts’. If the anonymous ‘they’ are the henchmen of despised business, the perfection of Newport belongs to a past that he treasures, whose detail he will develop in Notes of a Son and Brother. He records a similar affection in a letter to Edith Wharton when he observes, ‘I found Newport quite exquisite, like a large softlylighted pearl (and with the light partly of far-away associations)’.13 Even now (and he here anticipates a scene in The Ivory Tower in which its young hero is imagined as Phoebus Apollo), in bewailing the arrival of the ‘white elephants’, the newly-built mansions of Bellevue Avenue, he applies a transforming perspective which assimilates these new additions within a classical vista. It is a scene like some dim, simplified ghost of a small Greek island, where the clear walls of some pillared portico or pavilion, perched afar, looked like those of temples of the gods, and where Nature, deprived of that ease in merely massing herself on which ‘American scenery’, as we lump it together, is too apt to depend for its effect, might have shown a piping shepherd on any hillside or attached a mythic image to any point of rocks (AS, p. 224).

But this is an effortful achievement, vaguely delineated from a flattering distance, and, even then, only surmised. The native, haphazardly easy shape of what is commonly admired as American landscape has had to concede to rearrangement to allow for any chance sighting of a protagonist from Greek legend – a shepherd or some mythical creature. But the situation is hopeless: ‘there is absolutely nothing to be done’ for these houses or for their owners ‘roused from a witless dream’, as James reiterates these phrases, with Dickensian indignation. These ‘monuments of pecuniary power’, built or inhabited in the misconception that what is achieved ‘is beautiful, it is solitary and sympathetic’ are nevertheless themselves part of ‘the whirligig of time’ (AS, pp. 212–13), an incidental position clear to the observer who, amongst all the dust blown up, has ‘the sense of having sat out the drama, the social, the local, that of a real American period, from the rise to the fall of the curtain’. In the theatrical metaphor James consigns that earlier period, ‘the fifties, sixties, seventies … the eighties’, to social history. His own private past, regretted as part of ‘the pure Newport

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time’, belongs irrevocably to the ‘dimmest’, most ‘antediluvian’ days. There is no question of any magical revival or of repolishing treasured objects, of ‘waving the wand … of breathing again … on the quaintness of the old manners’ (AS, p. 221), even though such is the romantic glamour of his memories, it would seem that their magic alone might revive for the imagination at least something of that previous age. The opalescent ‘chastened light’ (AS, p. 210) of the New England coast here becomes glowing and multicoloured – a ‘world’ which could turn ‘in the gloaming, to purple and gold, and … the small sea-coves then gleam on its edge like barbaric gems on a mantle’. It was a time of ‘inconceivable innocence’ (a condition emphasized several times) as James touches on recalled events of his youth – ‘an afternoon for the Fort, and another for the Beach, and another for the “Boat-house”’ – possessing in their glowing colours, ‘A glamour as of the flushed ends of beautiful old summers, making a quite rich medium, a red sunset haze …’ (AS, pp. 221, 220). The Newport of the century’s ‘middle years’ was the right place for American society, the ‘most favoured resort of its comparative innocence’ (AS, p. 219). Untouched by the wealth from business enterprises it shares this innocence with James’s youthful years and he continues to associate the two in some of the volume’s most impassioned pages. Newport represented an innocence for a social group which considered itself bold and adventurous. Its visitors, those ‘fortunate folk’, took the place ‘seriously’ – ‘which was by intention very gaily’: ‘Those good people all could make discoveries within the frame itself – beginning of course to push it out, in all directions, so as sufficiently to enlarge it, as they fondly fancied, even for the experience of a sophisticated world’. James indulgently recalls them – once more reiterating age and transience, as if he sees them in a Browning lyric poem or anticipates the romantic excesses of Jay Gatsby’s created circle: ‘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, p. 220). This ‘social, personal Newport’ is a scene of energetic youth consigned in this post-Arcadian phase to extinction, or at least to obsolescence. Within this playground for the privileged James includes his own youth in a sudden access of nostalgia for the ‘hundred far-away passages of the extinct life and joy’ (AS, p. 219). It is the same place he had evoked in his life of the sculptor, William Wetmore Story, and memories of a ‘“vanished society”’, ‘old music faintly heard’, ‘the mellowness of candlelight in old saloons’. The scene of dancing and song, ‘of clustered gossiping groups on vague verandahs, where laughter was clear and the “note” of white dresses, waistcoats, trousers, cool’ nostalgically recalls a John Singer Sargent painting.14 Newport had once been ‘most perfectly guarded by a sense of margin and of mystery’, but it is clear to this ‘restored absentee’ that, in ‘these blank days’, ‘mar-

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gin has been consumed’, making way for the representatives of the ‘great black ebony god of business’ (AS, pp. 221–2), and thereby announcing a limitation on what is implicitly a boundless potential for the imagination. James was about to succumb to the attractions of blank white margins, of course, in turning to the tangibly written past of his own novels. His emendations would surround the text of those printed pages which formed the revised version which became the New York Edition. The associated people from those mid-century years whom James now recalls en masse carry his two dearest abstractions – Youth and Beauty. They crowd his memory with a desperate energy, vying for attention. He sees figures, faces, names, voices, ‘images and embodiments of youth mainly, and often of Beauty, and of felicity and fortune almost always, or of what then passed for such, pushed, under my eyes, in blurred gaiety, to the front’. This jostling group, from ‘An Age of Beauties’, when it seemed ‘easy to be, “On the Avenue,” a Beauty’ (AS, pp. 220–1), has nothing of the unsettling ghostliness of James’s more urban memories, embodying an energy and charm on parade, as it were, and threatening, pleasingly, to overwhelm him with something of the erotic charge of New York’s crowds of powerful men. A page heading goes on to designate these once young and beautiful people as ‘The Old Society’. Aside from the nostalgic detail of their pursuits and haunts, their relations with America are uneasy. It is a group of which James himself had membership and he will record his own developing self in A Small Boy and Others. The American Scene, in its images and characterization, sketches dilemmas and failures, the cultural tensions which define an exclusive social set which James will later translate into individual recollection. He places them significantly on the eastward-facing Atlantic headlands: ‘I see our friends ramble as if to stretch fond arms across the sea’ (AS, p. 223), as if yearning for Europe. For this turning of their backs upon America they have always been marked or marginalized. Their ‘critical habit’, their worshipping of the ‘ivory idol’ of leisure (in contrast with the black ebony of business), and their having lived in Europe has cut them off from America; they have become ‘excrescences on the American surface’, and, in James’s memory, have assumed an exotic deathly form, ‘embalmed … in that scented, somewhat tattered, but faintly spiced, wrapper of their various “European” antecedents’. They could perhaps only have lived in Newport, these ‘mild, oh delightfully mild cosmopolites’ (AS, p. 222) who have hibernated to avoid ‘the world, the hard American world’ in which they have found themselves. The real sign of their betrayal of that world is signalled not in their wider, or milder pursuits, but simply by their reading choice, in their subscribing to a periodical, sharing and discussing the Revue des Deux Mondes – ‘their main conversational note’ – not merely a magazine but an emblem which runs through James’s autobiographical writing, a document embodying Europe at its most culturally influential.15 These people became instances of what he calls ‘the great’,

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but then reduces (more realistically) to ‘the small – American complication’. James introduces a brief and tentative autobiographical perspective by referring to himself as ‘one’ and reveals the consequences of surrendering to the fateful European critical spirit, ‘the state of one’s having been so pierced, betimes, by the sharp outland dart as to be able ever afterwards but to move about, vaguely and helplessly, with the shaft still in one’s side’ (AS, p. 223). His own wounding, penetration and disfigurement were recorded many years earlier in words which anticipate this more general affliction: he felt his ‘European gains sinking gradually out of sight and sound and American experience closing bunchily together over them, as flesh over a bullet – the simile is àpropos!’16 The injury was not mortal for this victim since he would soon leave America, though he clearly recalls the mutilated flesh of the young soldiers he had visited and comforted in the Civil War.17 But, looking ahead to one of James’s greatest late fictions, the complicated ramifications of such a migration would be refined into the psychic horror of confrontation between the exile, allied temperamentally to the ‘poor sensitive gentleman’ of the kind for which the novelist himself confesses an ‘attested predilection’18 and the ghost presence of the thrusting, native entrepreneur who is his alter ego, or, indeed, an alternative self, which forms the climax of ‘The Jolly Corner’. Those who remained, the people of this remembered circle, have seemingly nurtured a ‘sterile’ nostalgia: ‘they appear to have left no seed’, ‘finding no successors’, returning ‘to Paris’ (AS, p. 223), the enriching centre of aesthetic debate, only in death. And, in relation to James’s own psyche, the language betrays the pain and potential for death when native culture accedes to the rich heritage of Europe. James’s own departure, along with the frequently eroticized terms he often applies to his own creativeness mark his escape from that mix of death and sterility. The coastal scene is now empty and pervasively monochrome as James maps out ‘on the grey page of to-day … the suggestive passages’ (AS, p. 215) he remembered. What he attempts to read is contained in ‘that unmistakable silvery shimmer’ of the Newport air.19 Will he find the ‘Old Town’, as ‘we’ had long ago called it, as if ‘it had been leading its little historic life for centuries’? He plays with the perceptions of ‘oldness’ and history, the different ‘kinds’ of past, the extent to which it is ‘recoverable’ for names both celebrated and obscure. (AS, p. 214). As a friend since childhood of T. S. Perry whose forbears were remembered for their distinguished naval service,20 he includes a private joke on the ‘Commodores Perry … somehow much multiplied at Newport, and quite monumentally ubiquitous’ (AS, p. 217). Of even greater historical significance, the Vernon house in which ‘Washington would have visited Rochambeau’ (AS, p. 218) in the ‘ancient war’ of Revolution which, ‘all “rusticated”’, has retained its ‘indefinable decency’, a site of public, historic rather than personal recollection, will not allow him to presume and so his hand falls from the doorknocker

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just as he is about to make a ‘tentative tap’. He reveals that same diffidence which prevented his crossing the bridge into the past in Harvard’s Law Library. Now as one of those who have ‘become Old themselves’ (with self-deprecatory comic capitalization) he records the suspense as he sets off with questions making ‘one’s heart beat faster’ as to ‘the validity of the past’ and whether ‘with the dear little blue distances in it’ it ‘were in danger now of being given away’. Dallying with history, he holds his breath, palpitating ‘with the sense of it’ (AS, p. 214). The Old Town contains a quaint, sanitized past, its streets, unlike some of those recorded in Italian Hours, unlikely to provide mysterious or alluring encounters: ‘the small silver whistle of the past, with its charming quaver of weak gaiety, quite played the tune I asked of it up and down the tiny, sunny, empty Newport vistas’. He finds once more ‘that ingenuous old-time distinction’. Perspectives ‘come to a stop like the very short walks of very old ladies’ (AS, pp. 215–16). Timid, frugal, wrapped in mourning drab, without a hint of unsuitable personal history, ‘What indeed but little very old ladies did they resemble, the little very old streets?’ Similarly patronizing terms are repeated later as he recalls ‘the little old Avenue … the little old cliff-walks … the little old white crescent’ (AS, p. 219), concluding that ‘all that had been had been little’, marking the refined constraints, in retrospect, of that society. He hears ‘the prolonged echo of that ingenuous old-time distinction’, and with that ‘handful of light elements’ tentatively suggests that the whole deserves ‘the name of picture’. ‘Objects’ and ‘elements’ are dipped in this air so that what is ‘uninteresting’ emerges ‘irradiating vague silver’ (AS, pp. 216–17), somehow quaint and eye-catching. Despite the hesitations at thresholds, the figurative elaborations which cover the workings and eccentricities of history, Newport emerges for James as a place ‘positively better than one had ventured to suppose’ in allowing ‘for one’s young simplicity’ (AS, p. 217). The discourse configures the writer himself as a courtly and somewhat affected cicerone (as he might phrase it), a guardian critical of the unavoidable progress of twentieth-century America, espoused to a European tradition which leaves him feeling uneasy and resorting to companionship with occasionally rebellious ghosts and metaphorical, decorous, very old women. They are beyond reproach with implications of ‘no adventure at any time’ (AS, p. 215) – models of propriety and sexlessness, associated with the seedless state of that earlier cultivated circle. The ideal ‘Newport’ of James’s memory is precious in both senses, a socially and intellectually exclusive haven. Yet the ghosts it harbours, as the ‘dead and buried generations’ are recalled, are quite willing to come back for the sake of the place in James’s imagined narrative of the incompatible values of mid-century versus contemporary America, and ready to ‘push off even the transparence of their shroud and get into motion for the peopling of a scene that a present posterity has outgrown’ (AS, p. 219).

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However unlikely that battle scene, Newport, with its surrounding landscape of sky, sea and sunsets, located, ‘by some refinement in the scheme of nature, just as a touchstone of taste’ (AS, p. 210), has surprised James. Its memories define a cultural and social moment jarringly incompatible with the contemporary philistinism embodied in those newly-built ‘white elephants’, ‘queer and conscious and lumpish’ (AS, p. 224). In the tension and unease the writer finds in the place’s relations with contemporary values, as in its unusual capacity to charm, it can be regarded as an emblem for James’s own fiction and its increasingly meagre readership. Just as that original social circle of the mid-century has been revisited, wondered at and relegated to history, forbiddingly exclusive and complete, so Newport itself is accessible only to the few, ‘with a beautiful little sense to be read into it by a few persons, and nothing at all to be made of it … by most others’ (AS, p. 210).

5 HEARING THE VOICES OF THE SOUTH

The narrator watches a group of corralled horses: ‘Through the window-glass of our Pullman the thud of the mischievous hoofs reached us, and the strong, humorous curses of the cow-boys. Then for the first time I noticed a man who sat on the high gate of the corral, looking on ….’ His train is just outside Medicine Bow, several thousand miles west of New England, but the episode comes (as may be clear from the narrative directness of the event) not from The American Scene but from Owen Wister’s The Virginian.1 This novel, an important contribution to the genre of the Western, had come out in 1902, two years before James’s trip, and Wister has a role to play in James’s text, and so indeed does the Pullman window in its designated function as a framework for observation. As if the reader is being acclimatized to an unknown culture, the West is introduced and framed by the observation window, the remote romantic Wyoming scene of The Virginian initially, at least, a kind of theatrical spectacle. In a typically inventive reversal whereby the distinctions between the state of being the observer and the observed are queried, The American Scene ends with the reader looking in on James framed by the same window, as he prepares to continue his journey to America’s West Coast. This sequel was never written up, despite James’s forward-looking mood as he sits ‘by the great square of plate glass through which the missionary Pullman appeared to invite me to admire the achievements it proclaimed’ (AS, p. 464–5). As in the Wister novel, the Pullman window serves, with an acknowledgment of photography’s ever more significant recording role, to encompass ‘the primitive plate, in perfect condition, but with the impression of History all yet to be made’. Indeed this means of observation is influential in registering ‘the charm of boundless immensity as overlooked from a car-window’. In its grandeur the great train speaks to him, promoting its own impression-forming capacity. Nature and space are conquered by ‘the general pretension of the Pullman, the great monotonous rumble … which seems forever to say to you: “See what I’m making of all this – see what I’m making, what I’m making!”’ (AS, pp. 462–3). James fulminates (or even rails) against such a ‘pretended message of civilization’, reminding it, in the most unreconstructed terms, of the ‘painted savages you – 68 –

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have dispossessed’ and bewailing the ‘ugliness’ it has brought to ‘the great lonely land’. The hotel has served as a convenient figure for James in generalizing upon the operations of at least one social group; travelling through South Carolina, he extends the image to the ‘hotel-like chain of Pullman cars’ in which he finds ‘the supreme social expression’. In their eloquence they carry, ‘if not Caesar and his fortune, at least almost all the facts of American life’ (AS, p. 406). James speaks in semi-ironic hyperbole, yet the voice he hears addressing him in its take-it-or-leave-it vernacular directness seems to encapsulate the feelings of the time, ‘as if every one and everything said to you straight: “Yes, this is how we are; this is what it is to enjoy our advantages; this moreover is all there is of us; we give it all out. Make what you can of it!”’ (AS, p. 407). The Pullman, then, as well as offering a silent and shaping perspective on the land itself, contains, in addition, the noisier, raised voices of the nation, uncompromisingly asserting the values of the present. On this journey to an America he has never known and which contains none of the ‘ghosts’ of the Northern states, new, epic aspects are revealed, even at moments when the ‘perfectly isolated traveller’ finds himself stranded ‘by the vast vague wayside’. In this exposed state, the ‘mere looming, mass of the more, the more and more to come’ strikes him as he defines the ‘Margin’ between the people and their land: ‘a scant central flotilla huddled as for very fear of the fathomless depth of water, the too formidable future, on the so much vaster lake of the materially possible’ (AS, pp. 400–1). Despite the luxury of the Pullman carriage, James emerges further into his own variant form of that alienation he had detected in the thronging crowds of New York to observe, with an awareness of the impenetrable and unnerving vastness of the continent, a culture still possessed by a past whose interest can be confined only to the tragic – other motives of the ‘old order’ reduced to bogus displays of masculinity and tattered futile remnants of the Old South. It is the impact upon James of both the grandeur and the impoverishment of this unknown landscape with its veiled erotic potential that I wish to outline in this chapter. Unassociated with his American youth, the South introduces James to facets of his own psychosexual identity as well as to the objects and locations of the nation’s history. In prospect he is infatuated, ‘so enamoured of the very name of the South’ as ‘to feel the echo of its voice in the yell of any engine that happened not to drag one either directly North or directly West’ (AS, p. 303). The Southern states exercise a dangerous charm for the innocent traveller: ‘from the moment the North ceases to insist, the South may begin to presume; ever so little, no doubt, at first, yet with protrusive feelers that tell how she only wants the right sensibility, the true waiting victim, to play upon’. The South demands, after romantic anticipation, a compliance with its charms, a casting off of ‘Puritan stiffening’ and acquiescence to ‘the interest of multiplied, lurking, familiar powers’ (AS, pp. 303–4). The Civil War, naturally for someone of James’s genera-

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tion, defines what the South means to him, its artefacts and monuments, social developments understood as part of history. His contemporary apprehension of the war, as mediated through his own early short stories, had been bound by New England settings, his gaze fixed with a degree of longing on the figure of the soldier as statuesque hero and, equally, as damaged invalid. Now, as he looks at Richmond’s ‘old State House’, James finds its architecture ‘quite of the mid-century’, as ‘remote and quaint and queer, as disconnected from us as the prolific age of Cyprus or of Crete’ (AS, p. 379). James’s journey south into Virginia in February 1905 was beset by ‘mistimed snow and ice’, but he confesses ‘how much I had staked on my theory of the latent poetry of the South’ and the importance of his ‘carrying it off again unimpaired’. He reverts to the brutalities of the mid-century once more as he recalls what Richmond, the Confederate capital, had signified to his ‘young imagination’, ‘lurid, fuliginous, vividly tragic’ as ‘one of the great reverberating historic names’, one of the ‘cities of the supreme holocaust, the final massacres, the blood, the flames, the tears’. Indeed his brother William, travelling near the end of the war on a scientific expedition to Brazil, had watched from the Atlantic the drifting smoke of the fired city.2 Yet after ‘a single interrogative stroll’ James finds the city to be ‘blank and void’, disclosing ‘no discernible consciousness, registered or unregistered, of anything’. The place is without ‘references’, a symbol of ‘the immense, grotesque, defeated project … of a vast Slave State’. Returning to his familiar European self-designation as ‘the pious pilgrim’, James confesses he ‘had wanted, had fairly required, this particular part of the country to be beautiful’. As a document of American history the only ‘element of beauty’ lies in its sadness ‘on the great scale and with a certain nobleness of ruin’ (AS, pp. 368–72). Having ‘invested’ heavily in the ‘American view’ which demands the input of a ‘brisk shower of general ideas’, James feels the city ‘weak – “adorably” weak’ (AS, pp. 372–3), as it ‘projects’ for him ‘a vivid and painful image – that of a figure somehow blighted or stricken, discomfortably, impossibly seated in an invalid-chair’ (AS, p. 377). He finds the ‘old’ Richmond lying ‘in its icy shroud with the very dim smile of modesty, the invalid gentleness, of a patient who has been freely bled’ (AS, p. 390). He is haunted by the shallowness of history and, correspondingly, of the Southern cause caught in an ‘image of the keeping-up of appearances, and above all of the maintenance of a tone, the historic “high” tone, in an excruciating posture’ (AS, p. 377). This is the disappointing stronghold of historic Southern power and defiance, now surviving in some distorted, public guise. In the disillusioning poverty of Richmond’s streets and public monuments, even the statue of General Robert E. Lee, commander of the celebrated Army of North Virginia, ‘high aloft and extraordinarily by itself ’ (AS, p. 392), is disappointingly situated.3 James finds a richer text to read not in the ‘Museum of the relics of the Confederacy’, which contained ‘not a single object of beauty’, but in

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its curator, ‘a little old lady, a person soft-voiced, gracious, mellifluous, perfect for her function who … received him as at the gate of some grandly bankrupt plantation’, while suggesting ‘the social tone of the South that had been’ (AS, p. 384). He has hardly surrendered to ‘this exquisite contact’ before feeling himself ‘up to his neck in a delightful, soothing, tepid medium’. She possesses the ‘beauty’ for which he has been searching, ‘that inimitability … of the South’. The pleasing revelation applies not in its relation to his own past but as a cultural document, a living illustration of an aspect of America’s diverse history, a presence which, with that reference to a bankrupt plantation, continues to carry the humiliation of the Southern past. The old lady, with ‘her high tone’ and ‘right manner’, ‘transported’ him ‘as no enchanted carpet could have done’ (AS, p. 385). The ‘positive melancholy sweetness’ of the public rooms of the Library, ‘a temple to the Confederate cause’, acts more directly to summon ‘that sad age’ of Civil War, though, once more, it embodies a continuity (however mortal) in history, ‘a link as from past to present to future’. James speaks to the ‘old mutilated Confederate soldier … trafficking in photographs in a corner of the room’, and he may continue to ‘“voice”’ some of the ‘more questionable claims of the past’. His human presence may justify, for the time, that cause which remains, otherwise, thin and shabby. As James considers the future, it is clear that he has arrived just as living memory and any apologists for the cause are about to be lost: ‘What will they be … the Southern shrines of memory, on the day the last old Confederate soldier shall have been gathered to his fate?’ (AS, pp. 391–2). Unlike the houses of New York and New England, the buildings of Richmond remain figuratively silent, though James, now the ‘unappeased visitor’, finds inscribed messages or finds, for instance, in the Museum, crowded with ugly and charmless objects, ‘that here was a pale page into which he might read what he liked’ (AS, p. 384), as if tempted into the excesses of an over-subjective reading. Unlike the more northern scenes of James’s account of contemporary America, with their aggressive dismissal of the past and their imposition of an unarguably, relentlessly progressive hold on the future, Southern locations appear in James’s eyes (and he hardly raises the question of Reconstruction) as still held by the errors of the past. Thus the old State House of Richmond, in process of renovation, communicates not directly but figuratively: he has never ‘seen a human institution so coldly and logically brought low as this memorial mass, anything rewritten so mercilessly small as this poor passage of a great historic text. The effect was as of a page of some dishonoured author – printed “on grey paper with blunt type”’ (AS, p. 379). A great theme of history has, then, been reduced to some cheap reprint, a shabbiness similar to what James finds in the memorials and monuments of Richmond. You can read America, he suggests, if you ‘know how to look’ and adopt the economy of synecdoche: ‘A single case speaks for many’ (AS, p. 368). Here in the South, whose ‘vivid images’ are ‘mainly beautiful

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and sad’, he can exercise what he calls in the page heading these ‘fond calculations’, in allowing an ‘all-sufficient specimen’ to meet the need: ‘Few elements of the picture are shy or lurking elements – tangled among others or hidden behind them, packed close by time and taking time to come out’. The message escapes from those Shakespeare-like repetitions of ‘time’, and disengages itself from its context. The available elements of American life ‘stand there in their row like the letters of an alphabet, and this is why, in spite of the vast surface exposed, any item, encountered or selected, contributes to the spelling of the word, becomes on the spot generally informing and characteristic’ (AS, p. 367). The journey not only returns James to some of the historic locations of America’s past but encourages him towards authorial disclosure (often in a series of tropes), sharing the challenges of how to record, select and synthesize the impressions and messages, with an assumed candour which invites the reader’s complicity. The practice of demonstrating the mechanics of discourse as well as the rationale for selecting its objects is most marked at the beginning of his journey, on departure southwards from the complexity of New York; reaching Philadelphia, he expresses his sense of ‘practical relief ’ in a moment of clarification experienced on arrival one winter afternoon in ‘a particularly wide-fronted house’ in a ‘large residential square’ where he will find ‘the salient note’: ‘the whole flower, assuredly, wouldn’t fail to bloom’. He feels, dramatically, ‘the change of half the furniture of consciousness’ (AS, p. 274). Relegated to the status of superstition is the idea that objects in a ‘scene’ possess a ‘mystic meaning proper to themselves’, whose significance ‘may be extracted by the chemistry of criticism’. As ‘critic’ he has been convinced that it is ‘the prime business and the high honour of the painter of life always to make a sense – and to make it most in proportion as the immediate aspects are loose or confused’. He had felt the greatest challenge in New York and the expedient found and acknowledged marks James’s postmodernist capacity to reflect upon and record the circumstances of his own text, even during its composition: ‘The last thing decently permitted him is to recognize incoherence – to recognize it, that is, as baffling; though of course he may present and portray it, in all richness, for incoherence’ (AS, p. 273). That warm, congenial moment of immersion on meeting the old lady curator at the Richmond Museum has marked just one further stage into a historic past to be located by the novelist: ‘It was but the matter of a step over – he was afloat on other waters, and had remounted the stream of Time’ (AS, p. 384). Moving through South Carolina to Charleston, he acknowledges his desire to find some ‘small inkling’ of the antebellum South, ‘an air-bubble only to be blown … through some odd fragment of a pipe’ (AS, p. 403). His journey has been difficult, the companion he has arranged to meet has failed, for the time, to turn up, and James disturbs two households in the early morning. Yet in the ‘sweet blank freshness of the day’, he feels ‘intimations and suggestions’ ‘swarming’ around

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him, and, as happened in Richmond, a casual encounter serves as an introduction to ‘the “old” South’; one of ‘a pair of prismatic bubbles’ in that fragment of pipe comes to him by the mere magic of the manner in which a small, scared, starved person of colour, of very light colour, an elderly mulattress in an improvised wrapper, just barely held open for me a door through which I felt I might have looked straight and far back into the past. The past, that of the vanished order, was hanging on there behind her – as much of it as the scant place would accommodate; and she knew this, and that I had so quickly guessed it; which led her, in fine, before I could see more, and that I might not sound the secret of shy misfortune, of faded pretension, to shut the door in my face (AS, p. 403).

However fanciful the suggested interpretation of this silent interchange (lasting no longer than ‘the little flare of a struck match’), it produces ‘the small historic whiff ’ of a ‘sedative cigarette’. He continues and finds ‘real walls’, ‘real gardens’ and ‘real doors’ offering retreat: ‘you are at once within’, and dismissing inferior Northern inability thus to discriminate, James admires ‘this finer feeling for the enclosure’. It is an initiation, though ‘into what I perhaps couldn’t have said’; it may simply be in its opportunity for privacy and ‘the habit of the siesta’. In Harvard Yard such enclosure acts as a welcome aesthetic device; in Charleston it comes, whatever its psychological cause, as a prospective area for ‘some dim dream that things were still as they had been … before the great folly’. He confesses to ‘liking’ the traces of history, the ‘real’ nature of what he comes across, the ‘scorches and scars’ (AS, pp. 404–5) which history, ‘the right great artist’ has allowed to survive. Food and meals have little place in The American Scene, but James recalls his lunch of hot chocolate, sandwiches and ‘a small delectable compound’, ‘Lady Baltimore’ cake, at Charleston’s ‘Exchange’, ‘the very Exchange in fact lately commemorated in a penetrating study, already much known to fame, of the little that is left of the local society’. He has now briefly caught up with his companion, Owen Wister, the author of that ‘penetrating study’, Lady Baltimore. That novel, which was to be a bestseller, came out in 1906, a year after this visit and a year before the appearance of The American Scene. James refers to Wister and himself as a ‘pair of expert romancers, closely associated for the hour’ (AS, p. 417), and the younger man and his fiction exercised a significant influence on James’s reading of Southern culture and history, even on his own relations with this past. The family connections were well established: Wister’s grandmother, the actor Fanny Kemble, was an old friend of James’s, and he also stopped off in Philadelphia to see Owen’s mother, Sarah Wister. Long ago Fanny Kemble had written of what had turned out to be her impossible life as the wife of a Southern slave owner in Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, a damning account of the system. The lunch enjoyed by the ‘romancers’ replicates

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the regular 12 o’clock meal of Augustus, the narrator of Lady Baltimore, who is equally enthusiastic about the cake: ‘“It’s all soft, and it’s in layers, and it has nuts – but I can’t write any more about it; my mouth waters too much”’.4 Lady Baltimore, for all its lightness and romantic plot, anticipates some of the sentiments and conclusions of James’s text and doubtless reflects something of the dialogue between the two men over those few days. The novel’s construction of Kings Port (or Charleston), and its nostalgia for a pre-war society – it is now the ‘most wistful town in America’, full of ‘visible sadness and distinction’ (p. 9) – prepares the reader for an endorsement of old values. Augustus, the young hero, looks around in the flower-filled churchyard: ‘It was as though the noble memories of his race looked out of his eyes, seeking new chances for distinction, and found instead a soil laid waste, an empty fatherland, a people benumbed past rousing’ (p. 79). His presence there is anomalous: ‘Youth, in the wake of commerce, had ebbed from Kings Port, had flowed out from the silent, mourning houses, and sought life North and West, and wherever else life was to be found’ (p. 156). The novel’s continuous point of reference is the Civil War, the South’s futile adherence to the ‘slave state’ and a more morally ambiguous retrospective sense of an antebellum civilization now lost: the narrator observes in church the ‘deeply veiled ladies of Kings Port, hushed in their perpetual mourning for not only, I think, those husbands and brothers and sons whom the war had turned to dust forty years ago, but also for the Cause, the lost Cause, that died with them’ (pp. 52–3). Kings Town, ‘this little city of oblivion, held, shut in with its lavender and pressed-rose memories’ (p. 49), also has its streets of predominantly black occupation eliciting a more sinister figurative analogy: ‘As cracks will run through fine porcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisible among the gardens and the houses’ (p. 175). Eric Haralson has pointed out that in the year of James’s return to the US, Wister became vice-president of the Immigration Restriction League.5 Whatever Wister’s racial anxieties, some critics have argued for James’s enlightened attitude towards African-Americans and Jews, but in his attitude-shaping language he seems no less racist than many of his contemporaries. For all the significance of the Pullman carriage in the aesthetic and sociological critique of the nation, it is revealing that he makes only ambiguous reference to the associated staff who were exclusively black. They are grouped with the ‘forlorn and depressed’ whites observed in increasing numbers on the journey south, while James admits ‘it was a monstrous thing, doubtless, to sit there in a cushioned and kitchened Pullman and deny to so many groups of one’s fellow-creatures any claim to a “personality”’ (AS, p. 398). Kenneth W. Warren, in Black and White Strangers, expresses surprise at William Boelhower’s claim that James speaks ‘“on behalf of cultural diversity”’, and more accurately affirms that ‘James’s contribution to the discourse of race in America is at best ambivalent’.6

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James acknowledges Wister’s guidance and knowledge in the text of The American Scene, characterizing (without naming) him as ‘a Northerner of Southern descent’ who ‘knew his South in general and his Carolina of that ilk in particular, with an intimacy that was like a grab-bag into which, for illustration, he might always dip his hand’.7 This is the South never seen by James even during the war, pursuing a social and political ideology now relegated to ‘antique folly’ (AS, pp. 410–1), though both of his younger brothers and some friends had fought, undergoing an experience which, in his envying, sometimes desiring eyes, conferred masculinity upon young manhood. He gazes out from Charleston’s Battery to Fort Sumter not far away, the site of the opening hostilities of the Civil War, and recalls the ‘vice of the act’ (AS, p. 413), of its being fired upon by Confederate troops. Yet minimizing any autobiographical opportunity, he makes no reference to Fort Wagner, a little further along the Atlantic Coast, where his brother Wilky had been severely wounded in a celebrated affray. James’s terms consolidate the male-dominated associations of war in contrast with the landscape now feminized by his discourse. Fort Sumter and its flag were long ago the ‘smitten face … flushed and scarred’ now ‘out of sight, though the intention of smiting and the force of the insult were … still the same’ (AS, p. 413). The forts still appear ‘faintly blue on the twinkling sea … like vague marine flowers’, and earlier hostilities have become domesticated in their shameful state, ‘the compromised slate, sponged clean of all the wicked words and hung up on the wall for better use’. If his own heart is to ‘harden to steel’, he must find something ‘hard’ to counter it, but in his ‘strolls’, James is increasingly swayed by ‘the impression of the consistency of softness’. It was ‘a city of gardens and absolutely of no men … the War might still have been raging and all the manhood at the front’ (AS, p. 414), and, as if repeating his own history of forty years earlier, whose contours are outlined in the few short stories of the Civil War, James implicitly remains the non-combatant observer, part of a female society, now grown old. The women he sees are few: ‘rare, discreet, fleeting figures that brushed the garden walls with noiseless skirts … clad in a rigour of mourning’. They would figure again as the genteel, choric widows of Lady Baltimore. James imagines a closed, segregated group ‘of some odd far East infected with triumphant women’s rights’, though without concession to any postcolonial values, he quickly concedes it is not ‘the muffled ladies who walk about predominantly in the East’. These aged, mourning women carry no sexual challenge. In a further figure of enclosure and celibacy, he characterizes it as ‘some little, old-world quarter of quiet convents where only priests and nuns steal forth – the priests mistakable at a distance, say, for the nuns’ (AS, p. 415), so that even superficial distinctions of gender become eroded. Seventy years earlier and long before the Civil War, Fanny Kemble (admittedly with all her fresh New England connections and memories) records a comparable impression of Charleston: ‘although

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the place is certainly pervaded with an air of decay, it is a genteel infirmity, as might be that of a distressed elderly gentlewoman’.8 Even at the ‘Exchange’ where he and Wister are served lunch by the ‘proud impoverished daughters’ of ‘war-wasted families’, marked by James as a potentially ‘supreme’ scene or ‘“subject”’ for the vigilant artist (and in fact there is such a scene in Lady Baltimore), he senses a ‘strange feminization’, which he translates into a grotesque, if ‘eloquent antithesis’: ‘whereas the ancient order was masculine, fierce and moustachioed, the present is at the most a sort of sick lioness who has so visibly parted with her teeth and claws that we may patronizingly walk all round her’ (AS, p. 417). If that pre-war society was sustained (in James’s eyes) by such theatrical caricatures of masculinity, the present, with its ‘social shrinkage and an economic blight unrepaired, irreparable’ (AS, p. 415), has compelled its children into a form of humbled servitude, its girls reduced to enacting on a commercial basis the hospitality which had characterized their former lives. Like the Virginian observer of Wister’s earlier novel, James has registered the American scene framed by the window of the Pullman carriage; but he also meets his own ‘Virginian’, a moment in Richmond in which the South’s unreconstructed masculinity temporarily emerges, in a chance liaison with a young man in which desire sharpens James’s attention. With a brief and gracious reference to his younger friend’s novel, The Virginian, James himself wonders coyly at the unlikeliness of this meeting: ‘he proved – for all the world like the hero of a famous novel – a gallant and nameless, as well as a very handsome, young Virginian’ (AS, p. 387). Having inherited the undiluted values of the antebellum South, this ‘stalwart and ingenuous’ devotee of the deserted museum where James approaches him, exhales ‘a natural piety’, a dedication to the Southern cause. The episode can be read – however momentarily – as a bracingly radical revision of so many of James’s fictional scenes of heterosexual romance set in European galleries and museums. Recalling his father’s violence against the North, comprising ‘the lucky smashing of the skull of a Union soldier’, the young man would be willing, as he says in a ‘charmingly suggestive’ way, to do such things ‘“all over again myself !”’, thus with the greatest clarity signalling an aspect of that ‘mustachioed’ aggression which belongs to an antiquated past, even though he is seen as ‘a son of the new South’. In a deliberately documentary style which seems to seek to diminish the erotic potential of the meeting (the manner is familiar from the chance encounters recorded in Italian Hours), James offers us the Virginian as exemplifying ‘a lively interest of type – linguistically not least (since where doesn’t the restless analyst grope for light?)’ (AS, pp. 387–8), though he also appears ‘intelligent and humorous and highly conversable’. He smiles ‘serenely’ as if to say ‘“That’s the kind of Southerner I am!”’ He may have no intention of hurting ‘a Northern fly’, but as he stands at their separating, ‘fair, engaging, smiling’, James cannot vouch for what ‘he would have done to a Southern negro’

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(AS, p. 389). Maintaining a feminized role, and perhaps respecting that ‘natural piety’, James offers no challenge to these beliefs. Indeed the question seems less pressing in presence of that engaging charm with its potential to distract James from issues of political and social justice.9 Owen Wister’s fictional Virginian hero draws the gaze of its narrator in his dark-haired elegance and silk neckerchieves as absorbingly as James’s young acquaintance. He moves anonymously across the Wyoming landscape, a romantic and self-contained figure, whom James admired in his letters to the author, only bringing predictable disappointment when, finally, he embarks on marriage and family life. The pretty school-mistress from distant Vermont has to be patiently educated as to the acceptability of summary execution and even the gunfight in the lawless West before she can bring herself to marry him. James was dismissive of that final, happy endorsement of normalcy expressed through marriage and family as he reveals in a letter to Wister of 1902. He admires ‘the subject itself … the exhibition, to the last intimacy, of the man’s character, the personal and moral complexion and evolution, in short, of your hero’, but confesses with a scorn which touches on misogyny that ‘nothing would have induced me to unite him to the little Vermont person … which is mere prosaic justice, and rather grim at that’. He would have preserved the Virginian’s romantic solitude, his uncompromised male integrity, for a premature and tragic outcome: ‘I wouldn’t have let him live and be happy; I should have made him perish in his flower and in some splendid noble way’. After these suggestions, which echo the fatal and homoerotic climax of Roderick Hudson, James concludes, patting Wister (like many of his younger male friends) ‘violently and tenderly on the admirably assiduous back’, by asking him for ‘something equally American on this scale or with this seriousness’,10 and four years later Lady Baltimore was published. Owen Wister is an influential presence, both physically and in terms of his fiction, in these Southern pages of The American Scene. James had known the younger writer since his boyhood and was attached to him, writing to his mother, Sarah Wister, in January 1905, in typically effusive style, that he ‘yearned’ to see him – ‘tell him, the wretch’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 336). In these two successful novels Wister engaged with the American scene in a defining way which moved beyond the individual life to consider (however romantically) aspects of national identity and history. The degree to which James wondered at this alternative direction for fiction is unknown, but, given his revised feelings about America, as well as the biographical parallels between them, it seems likely that the meeting caused him to contemplate his own strategies in relation to life choices as well as to novel writing. Like James, Wister was a privileged Northerner who had been educated in Europe. Like the older generation too, he had suffered ill-health: James describes him as ‘queerly, though I think but imaginatively and superficially blighted in health – only physical’ in a letter to Edith Wharton.11 Such

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invalidism, reminiscent of the early ill-health of both Henry and William James, has been interpreted as typical for such young men of their class and social background.12 In this brief companionship with the young and handsome Wister, made vulnerable through illness, James was presented with a novelist adept at dramatizing male experience, and whose subject would find a definitive location in America. There is a further literary, if posthumous presence inscribed in these Southern chapters, as Leon Edel has pointed out (Life, vol. II, pp. 478–9). Removed from Charleston, a city filled with the evidence of the ‘monomania’ of the ‘slave state’ which has left behind ‘vacancy’, ‘the old Cemetery by the lagoon … distils an irresistible poetry’, by which James seems to mean a contrasting mood, uncomplicated by historic human error. Introducing a European perspective, he reflects not on the dead, but on the ‘golden afternoon, the low, silvery, seaward horizon, as of wide, sleepy, game-haunted inlets and reed-smothered banks, possible site of some Venice that had never mustered, the luxury, in the mild air, of shrub and plant and blossom that the pale North can but distantly envy’ (AS, p. 419). The imaginary transformation of an Adriatic scene waiting to be civilized may contain his memories of a close friend, Constance Fenimore Woolson, novelist and short-story writer, who knew Charleston and South Carolina well, was associated with Venice and had died there (most probably suicidally) in 1894. James was certain, at any rate, that her death, ‘an overwhelming, haunting horror’,13 was self-inflicted. Suffering from an isolating deafness and prone to depressive illness, it seems that she had loved James, though his role emerges as dubious.14 She had been buried in Rome on 31 January 1894 and James had later visited the grave; he was in Charleston on 10–12 February 1905 and so, perhaps, the season and the place may have reminded him of her. When James had sailed from Southampton in the previous August, a co-traveller was his friend Mrs Clara Woolson Benedict, Fenimore’s sister. In his 1887 essay on Woolson, James praises her short-story collection, Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches, pointing out ‘the voicelessness of the conquered and reconstructed South’ and admiring Woolson’s originality in evoking this neglected region: ‘no social revolution of equal magnitude had ever reflected itself so little in literature, remained so unrecorded, so unpainted and unsung’. He characterizes the writer and her subject in strongly gendered terms, believing that ‘a sympathy altogether feminine has guided her pen’: ‘no daughter of the land could have handled its peculiarities more indulgently, or communicated to us more of the sense of close observation and intimate knowledge’.15 ‘Rodman the Keeper’ is full of male figures, living and dead: the keeper of the cemetery of 14,000 Union soldiers (one of many in the region) nurses a former Confederate soldier who is dying, maintaining the irreconcilable antipathies between North and South. The tale belongs to Woolson’s pre-European, pre-Jamesian life, an

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expression of grief on an altogether grander and more austere scale than anything in James’s own Civil War tales. She confessed in 1876 that ‘the war was the heart and spirit of my life, and everything has seemed tame to me since. Many persons do not feel so – I find. But I feel so, and cannot help it. I cannot even now hear the old war-tunes, or pass those soldiers’ cemeteries at the South, or see an old flag, without choking up and turning away my head.’16 The South Carolina landscape clearly contained for James the documentary evidence of the futility of the Southern cause as well as returning him to a more private review of feelings on the Civil War and the years that followed.17 The ‘luxury’ and unworked potentiality of that coastal scene as a ‘Venice that had never mustered’, an absorbing atmosphere for retrospection, might well have included in its formal commemoration of mortality the brutally ended life of one of the few women with whom he had enjoyed companionship. In the essay written when she had become a friend, he had characterized Woolson as ‘conservative’ in feeling: ‘for her the life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations’.18 The idea is directed more properly to her fictive interests, but it gathers an unforeseen irony in the manner of her violent death, privacy sacrificed as, in her delirium, she fell from a Venetian window. A nearby place, on ‘another day’, ‘when the silvery seaward outlook still prevails’, leads James to acknowledge the seeming need, in certain cases, for history to involve suffering in order to sustain our interest. He goes on to confess that, on this occasion, he will refrain from committing himself. Once more, he is thinking, ostensibly, of the South, though the sequence of ideas – necessary suffering, his own considered hesitancy – has some bearing on the evasive relationship with Woolson.19 On a wet chill afternoon he sits before a log fire in a ‘lapsed and readministered residence’ and hears talk of ‘a possible new society, a possible youthful tone, a possible Southern future’: ‘There were men here, in the picture – a few, and young ones’. The natural consequence of this vision of a viable political model, so emphatically of the future, is that the ‘becraped, feminized world was accordingly for the moment in abeyance’. Yet that ‘possible’ renewal animated by what has been noted formerly as absent – youth and maleness – may impoverish the traditional South which must remain ‘tragic, as it were, in order to beguile’ (AS, pp. 419–20). One must, ‘cold-bloodedly’, concede that this is the only way in which ‘“these people”’ can be ‘interesting’. James defers to ‘“my friend”’, presumably Owen Wister, in concluding that their ‘“sadness and sorrow”’ – war and its lengthy aftermath – have been so ‘“expensively produced”’. Characteristically, James signals his own indecision, a reluctance to endorse a masculine future in favour of a feminine, beguiling past. In an image which continues the nautical, Venetian reference, he reveals that he will not ‘“land”’ at all, ‘making my skiff fast to no conclusion whatever, only pushing out again and letting it, for a supreme impression and to prepare in the aftertime the best remembrance, drift where it

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would’ (AS, pp. 420–1). He will surrender, therefore, to detachment and passivity, a condition denoting, in terms of the log-fire scene he has himself recalled, a diminished or alternative masculinity. In thus holding off from a landing place and referring responsibility to an external and executant agent, James adopts that familiar stance of awakened susceptibility – open to the ‘impressions’ he invokes from the work’s opening, ‘conscious’ of what surrounds him, ready to ‘vibrate’ in response to any stimulus. In his essay on James’s apprehension of ‘the intimate presence of the negro’, Eric Haralson asks whether the grotesque figure of the South, in her ‘excruciating posture’, that ‘dear old invalid, so bound up in darkness, does not bear traces of self-portraiture and -solicitude’, though he stops short of suggesting that the physically discomforted author, ‘the beleaguered James “equals” the ravaged South’.20 This may be one step too far, but, more conservatively, it is clear that in scanning these urban and rural landscapes, in reaching, on the basis of what he sees and senses, a cultural critique, James is conducting, in the most informal way, an inventory of his own psychic condition. He looks upon the body of the Virginian (both real and fictional) with desire, whose departure he regrets; the figure of Constance Fenimore Woolson who had importuned him by her expectations or even by her dying is located appropriately, at least by association, in the cemetery. The only female figure by which he can safely and asexually be beguiled, herself widowed and without men, is the South herself, and even her body may be about to be incorporated within the plans of young men.

6 ‘UNWRITTEN HISTORY’: THE ROMANCE OF JAMES’S CIVIL WAR STORIES

‘The South’, still defined for James by ‘“sadness and sorrow”’, the aftermath of a war fought forty years earlier, had exposed him to an America with an uncertain future, beautiful, but tied to a moribund past of unresolved racial division. If the region’s shabby disfigurement finds reciprocal expression in James’s ailing body, the outbreak of civil war in ‘the soft spring of ’61’ was also physically inscribed upon it, as he recalls. During the rescue operation at a stable fire in Newport, Rhode Island, he had sustained an ‘obscure hurt’ to his back – ‘a private catastrophe’ to be compared, he asserts, ‘bristling with embarrassments’, to ‘the great public convulsion’ (Aut, pp. 414–15).1 As a means of reviving that younger Henry James in his early twenties who thus parallels the condition of his body, in retrospect, with the imminent wounds of war inflicted on the nation by itself, I want to discuss some of his earliest fiction, the three Civil War tales, ‘The Story of a Year’, ‘Poor Richard’ and ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’. With their arch and sometimes juvenile manner, they represent an unstudied, pre-European version of James’s American self, but within their rural Northern setting they introduce a set of thematics which anticipate the inflected subjectivity of the mature author. Their narratives privilege male experience, however refracted through female observers; they contain illness and injury – as we shall see, part of James’s romantic embodiment of masculine fragility; conventionally masculine forms of behaviour are mediated through a consciously feminized narrator. They record the first appearance of the uniformed American soldier who would become the locus of James’s desire across the decades. James did not participate in the Civil War, though he felt that the ‘obscure wound’ and its ensuing chronic pain2 brought him close to the suffering of those he regarded as his fellow comrades. Both his younger brothers, Robertson and Wilky James, enlisted, as well as a number of his friends, amongst them Oliver Wendell Holmes, but neither William nor Henry was accepted for duty.3 The war transformed these young men, physically and psychically, leaving James himself on the periphery of that small Boston-Cambridge set of friends. The early short stories reconfigure some of these unresolved and complex experiences, – 81 –

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exploring a number of romantic possibilities associated with a distant war which extends its influence to domestic and private experience. Young women are the ostensible centre of attention, yet they can prove as dangerous to men’s health as the war itself. Men, on the other hand, look at each other in a mutual rapport which relegates and marginalizes women. These are the same young heroes who in the homoerotic freedom and sentiment of old age he will come to recollect as a ‘most amusing figure of romance’ (Aut, p. 424), still in their mystery capable of moving him. Despite their self-conscious style and literary allusiveness, these tales interrogate the conventions of gender, eroding its clear distinctions of conduct and propriety, and they look tenderly upon the male body in good health and suffering. But first, a sample of the continuity of James’s imagination. Gray Fielder, the hero of the late and unfinished novel The Ivory Tower, is reconciled to his dying uncle from whom he will inherit a large fortune. The bequest and the opportunities it brings typify the transforming, fairy-tale-like gestures which crowd James’s fiction. Having shunned the values of business embodied in his rich uncle, Gray stands at his bedside, a pure, naïve figure of imagination and goodness, as his uncle, with a candid admiration between men which James’s twentieth-century manner celebrates, gazes up at him. He and his nurse are charmed: Gray is momentarily transformed, changing gender to become a princess as a specific fairy-tale is invoked. His uncle confides to his nurse, ‘He tried something a minute ago to settle me, but I wish you could just have heard how he expressed himself ’. ‘It is a pleasure to hear him – when he’s good!’ She laughed with a shade of impatience. ‘He’s never so good as when he wants to be bad. So there you are, sir!’ the old man said. ‘You’re like the princess in the fairy-tale; you’ve only to open your mouth –’ ‘And the pearls and diamonds pop out!’ – Miss Goodenough, for her patient’s relief, completed his meaning. ‘So don’t try for toads and snakes!’ she promptly went on to Gray (IT, p. 115).

The reference is to Charles Perrault’s ‘Les Fées’, whose heroine, innocent and good like Gray Fielder, lives with her mother and sister, both ‘désagréables’ and ‘orgueilleuses’. During a visit to the well where she meets and helps an old, poor ‘bonne femme’ she is rewarded for her kindness to this enchantress by having flowers, diamonds and pearls fall from her mouth as she speaks. The older, nasty daughter called Fanchon is then sent to try her luck, but meets up this time with ‘une dame magnifiquement vêtue’. Disappointed, she rudely and reluctantly helps her. But the woman is ‘la même fée’ and, as a consequence, she is cursed by having toads and snakes issue from her mouth.4 Thus kindness is rewarded, as Perrault points out in his moralité. In this late fiction James takes from the

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French fairy-tale the simplest of applications, granting unlikely influence, in an extended imaginative series of scenes, to wisdom and innocence – as here, where, in the person of Gray Fielder, they attract the affectionate indulgence of an old man and his nurse. The parable, which preaches the simple power of words as they reflect the heart, clearly held some special and lasting significance for James because it is referred to in the first story published under his own name, ‘The Story of a Year’. The tale was written before the Civil War had ended and it begins with the secret betrothal of two lovers. Jack Ford, the young hero, returns eagerly to battle whilst the girl who lives with his disapproving mother waits faithfully until news comes of his serious wounding. His mother leaves to care for him and, as time passes, Lizzie Crowe (fulfilling the mother’s low opinion of her) becomes acquainted with another young man. Contrary to expectations her fiancé returns and, informed by his mother of this new suitor, releases Lizzie from her promise, wishes her well and quickly dies. Lizzie passionately (but presumably temporarily) dismisses the new man. The narrative digression which alludes to Perrault’s ‘Les Fées’ reveals a young James who is more ironic and mannered, more actively intent on archly revising the fairy-tale. The young soldier hero, who awaits the command to return to war, has just proposed to Lizzie, but requests that she remain silent about the engagement. The narrator turns to the reader and sympathizes with the girl’s disappointment before going on, in an outpouring of sexual anxiety, to belittle through her example female experience and aspirations: Imagine the feelings of the damsel in the fairy-tale, whom the disguised enchantress had just empowered to utter diamonds and pearls, should the old beldame have straightway added that for the present mademoiselle had better hold her tongue. Yet the disappointment was brief. I think this enviable young lady would have tripped home talking very hard to herself, and have been not ill pleased to find her little mouth turning into a tightly clasped jewel-casket. Nay, would she not on this occasion have been thankful for a large mouth, – a mouth huge and unnatural, – stretching from ear to ear? Who wish to cast their pearls before swine? The young lady of the pearls was, after all, but a barnyard miss (CT, vol. I, p. 55).

This laboured revision of Perrault, opinionated and hostile towards women, progresses to a final imagining of ‘a mouth huge and unnatural’, as fairy-tale makes way for a moment of psychosexual fear. ‘The Story of a Year’ revisits other fairy-tale problems and horrors. Lizzie’s parents are dead and she lives with a surrogate mother (Mrs Ford) who shows her little affection (though this unprotected state is, of course, typical for a number of later James heroines and there are many dysfunctional families encountered ‘in every possible state of dissolution’5). Mrs Ford is transformed into a murderous old witch through the narrative’s choice of grotesque, Dickensian detail. Whilst sewing, she discusses with her son her dislike for his fiancée: ‘from the grimness

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with which she bit off the end of her thread it might have seemed that she fancied herself to be executing a human vengeance … Mrs Ford performed another decapitation of her thread’ (CT, vol. I, pp. 60–1). The potential for domestic violence remains confined within a figurative medium. During the days when she agonizes over her loyalty to the wounded Jack whilst being drawn to her new suitor, Lizzie 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 (CT, vol. I, p. 78).

The psychic origins of this dream which involves unnatural death, a form of life in death, a blessing from the dying body, the physical concealment of the horror, are obscure, but the burying of a body which may or may not be dead and that final stamping of the ground ‘in a lonely place’ invoke the darkest conventions of folk and fairy-tales. The tale momentarily enters a complex, mysterious level of experience suggestive of guilt and its repression. If Lizzie is burying the mortallywounded Jack, ‘he of the wounds’, to welcome the new suitor, ‘he of the dark eyes’, she may also be enacting for James himself and, by extension, the American people, the tragic completion of war, the sacramental acknowledgment of young men who had sacrificed life in a determined and irrevocable burial of the past. James recalled Perrault’s fairy-tales throughout his life, and when asked in 1907 to nominate a favourite finally chose, with some difficulty – ‘so beguiling and absorbing to me were all such flowers of nursery legend’ – ‘Le Petit Poucet’, or ‘Tom Thumb’: ‘I seem to remember that story in some other particularly thrilling and haunting form, with a picture of the old woodcutter and his wife sitting at night in the glow of the fire and the depths of the wood’.6 The illustrator was Gustave Doré and this edition of Perrault appeared in 1862, when James was beyond childhood. But the Civil War was just a year old and ‘The Story of a Year’ was written and revised between March and November 1864,7 so that allusions to fairy-tales in this contemporary tale of war seem less surprising. James was excited by ‘the thrilling and haunting form’ of Doré’s drawings.8 The two lovers of ‘The Story of a Year’, staring up at the sky, have an apocalyptic vision of war, a grandiose spectacle representing its fearsome rituals. Nature has created an epic, panoramic scene and its flamboyant detail recalls the dark, dense elaborations of Doré’s illustrations: As Ford looked at the clouds, it seemed to him that their imagery was all of war, their great uneven masses were marshalled into the semblance of a battle. There were

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columns charging and columns flying and standards floating, – tatters of the reflected purple; and great captains on colossal horses, and a rolling canopy of cannon-smoke and fire and blood. The background of the clouds, indeed, was like a land on fire, or a battle-ground illumined by another sunset, a country of blackened villages and crimsoned pastures. The tumult of the clouds increased; it was hard to believe them inanimate. You might have fancied them an army of gigantic souls playing at football with the sun. They seemed to sway in confused splendor; the opposing squadrons bore each other down; and then suddenly they scattered, bowling with equal velocity towards north and south, and gradually fading into the pale evening sky. The purple pennons sailed away and sank out of sight, caught, doubtless, upon the brambles of the intervening plain. Day contracted itself into a fiery ball and vanished (CT, vol. I, pp. 50–1).

For James of the mid-1860s, the war was accessible primarily through the exercise of imagination and, perhaps, the Gothic detail of Gustave Doré’s illustrations. The more direct messages to be read in his three Civil War tales enact moments in private lives, and, with regard to James’s own interiority, rehearse a complementary series of events which raise questions on the nature of masculinity and how it functions in relation to women. The unfolding of national history is witnessed from a distance. Battle confers upon its participants a masculinity within which men look at each other in rivalry or subjective recognition. If women form the centre of men’s single and sometimes corporate attention, their motives are subject to enquiry, the conventional female virtues of patience and faithfulness unravelled with a clarity which signifies a depth of sexual unease in James. Those who wait may not necessarily be rewarded but consigned to a potentially futile future. Dissenting from contemporary paradigms evident in popular fiction, the stories undermine the idea that the ideally brave, heroic male is rewarded by the gift of the virtuous female. Women are predominantly associated with the mundane continuity of life, whilst men, unusually but periodically cast as objects of desire, enter or return to the domestic circle, their presence subjected to the admiring gaze of the female or feminized onlooker. The opening of ‘The Story of a Year’ unapologetically asserts a domestic historical perspective, reminiscent of George Eliot’s celebration of obscure lives: ‘I have no intention of following Lieutenant Ford to the seat of war. The exploits of his campaign are recorded in the public journals of the day, where the curious may still peruse them. My own taste has always been for unwritten history, and my present business is with the reverse of the picture’ (CT, vol. I, p. 62). The position forms the antithesis of Thomas Carlyle’s historical narrative of heroic great men, a writer also familiar to Henry, Senior and William James. Indeed, twenty years later, James would quake at the likelihood of Carlyle’s acceptance of Emerson’s invitation to visit America. He never came, but ‘there is something really almost heart-shaking in the thought of his transporting that tremendous imagination and those vessels of wrath and sarcasm to an innocent New Eng-

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land village’.9 In the tale’s setting of ‘innocent’ rural New England a more distant war had been fought, when ‘the first Revolution had boomed awhile in their midst’ when the natives were ‘clad in sober homespun’, and ‘His Majesty’s troops wore red’. Now, in ‘these happy Northern glades’, the hero, Jack Ford (his name monosyllabically masculine), ‘attired in the great brightness of blue and gold which befits a freshly made lieutenant’ might seem a strange sight, but he does carry with him ‘not the rumor’ but ‘some of the reality of war, – a little whiff of gunpowder, the clanking of a sword’ (CT, vol. I, p. 49). The narrative’s frequent shifts into a mock-heroic register betray an unresolved, uneasy evasiveness, an uncertainty repeated in James’s camp reference to the tale in a letter as ‘a simple story’, a ‘novelette’, ‘historiette’ or ‘bob-tale’.10 Having established the tale’s humble relation to history, James asserts the simple equivalence of the soldier with romance: ‘My story begins as a great many stories have begun within the last three years, and indeed as a great many have ended; for, when the hero is despatched, does not the romance come to a stop?’ (CT, vol. I, p. 49). The male, further eroticized by military uniform,11 becomes the locus of attention and desire, a model of uncompromising cultural masculinity, initiating a narrative discourse which both dissimulates and reveals, whose theme delineates the romance of James and the Union soldier, a ‘reversed’ perspective, an entirely private version of ‘history’. In a mock-heroic framework designed ostensibly to undermine the hero’s status, James’s admiration is projected on to the watching local people: ‘although Mr John Ford had his campaign still before him, he wore a certain comely air of camp-life which stamped him a very Hector to the steady-going villagers’ (CT, vol. I, p. 49). Having noted his ‘comely air’ the narrative later offers a further classical fancy, based on the adoration of Lizzie, her gender relegating her to the most mundane of chores for patriotic women of the time, the knitting of socks: ‘if half the lovesome fancies that flitted through Lizzie’s spirit in those busy hours could have found their way into the texture of the dingy yarn, as it was slowly wrought into shape, the eventual wearer of the socks would have been as light-footed as Mercury’ (CT, vol. I, p. 63). Jack Ford is deemed by James – with a further self-protective Elizabethan epithet – to be ‘a very pretty fellow to Miss Elizabeth Crowe’ (CT, vol. I, p. 49). By means of Lizzie’s enthralment with her hero, James too is permitted with comparably loving gaze to dwell upon Jack’s face. Both wonder at the extent of young male complacency, part of whose desirability rests in his remaining oblivious to attention: Jack gazes ‘soberly at the empty sky. Soon the young girl’s eyes stole up to his face. If he had been looking at anything in particular, I think she would have followed the direction of his glance; but as it seemed to be a very vacant one, she let her eyes rest’ (CT, vol. I, p. 51). The moment is of abject devotion, the contrast between the indifference of the object and the infatuated gaze of the observer suggesting some origin in homoerotic fantasy, as if unguarded

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passion is to be sustained only so long as its object remains oblivious and neglects to intercept the gaze. Meanwhile, the admirer’s eyes may wander freely and fully. In this assumption of subservience which disregards heterosexual orthodoxy, James can only hint at a misgiving concerning the young man’s worthiness. Jack’s ascendancy may just belong to the braggadocio tradition: under this scrutiny he is, in fact, not looking at ‘anything in particular’; with something of the vacuousness of the mannequin, he is only an objectified ‘pretty’ face. A few years later, in Roderick Hudson, Rowland Mallet, the hero’s rich benefactor in the novel which explores a variety of configurations of homosocial intimacy,12 is allowed a comparable moment of gender ambiguity achieved through homoerotic fascination. With an intuitiveness which allies him to feminine stereotypes and confirms the corresponding male-associated absence of imagination, Rowland, granted ‘an instinctive vision of how this beautiful youth must be loved by his female relatives’, disturbs Roderick’s youthful rebelliousness by reminding him before they leave for Europe how deeply his mother must love him. His words offer a coded version of another truth – how lovable Roderick is, indeed, how much he loves him. Later, on the Atlantic crossing, Roderick confesses that he is engaged to one of these relatives, Mary Garland, for whom Rowland has himself felt a romantic attachment. Yet the ‘great dizzying lurch’13 felt by Rowland marks his loss of the young sculptor rather than Mary.14 Jack Ford, for all the crude subterfuges of the early narrative, stands as the embodiment of the desired soldier, belonging to some private level of James’s experience, and re-enacted in a different language in the poetry of Walt Whitman, an artist dismissed by James at this time.15 The novelist would return to the soldier in portraits of beloved individuals and groups of men in his autobiographical writing of forty-five years later, a sustained emblem for the transgressive desire which he could only acknowledge in his later, twentieth-century years. One of James’s enlisted friends, Oliver Wendell Holmes, may have served as this model for assertively untroubled masculinity16 (and consequent feminizing of James himself ). Leon Edel has commented on the complementary nature of their relations at this time: ‘The friendship with Henry was between a sharpwitted young man, all action and passion, touched with the fire of the conflict and thrice wounded by it, and a sedentary literary youth, psychically wounded by the same conflict, all hidden passion without physical action’.17 In the summer of the year which ended the Civil War, a small group of James’s friends (organized by Mary Temple) holidayed in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Accommodation was short and it seemed that he and Wendell would have to share a bed.18 James’s letter to Holmes on the problem uses the same semi-jocular, archaic language reflecting unease which is to be found in the tale. Mary Temple had ‘ferreted out a single room, the only one in the

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place, high or low – far or near. This the wretch who owned it refused to furnish with two beds; but she took it and when we get up there we can pull his own out from under him … Oh why art thou not here to come forth to the romantic sea girt glen to which I propose to direct my steps? … You who are susceptible thereunto should come here. You would soon ripen into absolute perfection.’19 A letter James wrote from Jefferson, New Hampshire, on 29 July 1865 attempts to establish a normative heterosexual framework (however affectionate and effusive the language), though even here this is eroded by the weirdly disparaging, easy equating of ‘women’ with ‘woods’: ‘it’s tolerably cool; there are woods; there are women. Put two and two together. The woods are not vast; neither are the women; but they will perhaps hold you a week or so. Come therefore, as soon as you may, for in my heart of hearts, you are longed for.’20 The experience of war confirmed for James a young man’s masculinity. As the two fictional lovers in ‘The Story of a Year’ emerge from their romantic walk on a May evening, Jack’s physical ease confirms to the expert on male physiognomy (he who can ‘read it aright’) his sexual readiness: ‘Ford was lounging along with that calm, swinging stride which often bespeaks, when you can read it aright, the answering consciousness of a sudden rush of manhood’. In a further refinement of pleasure in contemplating the masculine, James feminizes his hero, who carries (with unquestioning condescension) some of his fiancée’s accessories: ‘The young girl’s blue veil was dangling from his pocket; he had shouldered her sun-umbrella after the fashion of a musket on a march: he might carry these trifles’ (CT, vol. I, p. 50). Yet this superficial disturbing of gender identity acts principally to accentuate and eroticize the soldier’s masculinity. Jack Ford looks forward to his return to battle whose conditions are anticipated in the more commonplace inconveniences of a walk in the country: ‘Ford’s boots and trousers had imbibed a deep foretaste of the Virginia mud; his companion’s skirts were fearfully bedraggled’ (CT, vol. I, p. 49). In developing an ill-judged mock-heroic register Jack progresses (with Lizzie’s assent) to a further level of narcissism constructed not upon wounds sustained in epic battle, but in anticipation of his own heightened masculinity: ‘“I shall be all incrusted with mud and gore. And then I shall be magnificently sunburnt, and I shall have a beard.”’ As the conversation continues, women are correspondingly reduced to a comparative role, consigned to trivial occupations of which men will, necessarily, know little: ‘“I mean to alter my face as you do your misfitting garments, – take in on one side and let out on the other. Isn’t that the process? I shall crop my head and cultivate my chin.”’ Lizzie, with the amused exasperation of a heroine engaged in some battle of the sexes from Shakespearean comedy, merely exclaims, ‘“the vanity of men in their faces!”’ (CT, vol. I, p. 52), yet she remains captivated by such vanity, as indeed does the narrative.

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With Jack Ford at war in the South, Lizzie takes to her bedroom a surrogate token of masculinity, a portrait of George McClellan, commander of the vast army of the Potomac.21 In contrast with Jack’s, even her letter-writing is banal and inferior; and she has already facetiously planned to resign herself to oppressive domesticity – to liking boiled mutton, history and plain sewing (CT, vol. I, p. 55). His mother departs to nurse the badly wounded Jack, and in the intervening months, led to believe that he will die, Lizzie allows herself to be wooed by another man: ‘it was relief to have responsibility denied her. Like most weak persons, she was glad to step out of the current of life, now that it had begun to quicken into action’ (CT, vol. I, p. 76).22 And when Jack is brought home Lizzie once more gazes at his ‘pale, senseless face’, finding it ‘strangely handsomer: body stood for less’. She takes his hand, ‘now thinner and whiter than her own’ (CT, vol. I, pp. 91–2), as if he has been emasculated, and the pathos of the scene attracts a quotation from Tennyson’s The Princess, ‘Home they brought her warrior dead, She nor swooned nor uttered cry’, as if to authenticate her mourning. As he lies suffering, Lizzie wonders ‘whether Jack was not dead. Death is not thinner, paler, stiller’.23 A further, classical allusion which casts Lizzie in the role of a Greek goddess indicates James’s difficulty in imagining the young woman in possession of any inspirational or even plainly human resources: ‘Poor Ford lay, indeed, not unlike an old wounded Greek, who at falling dusk has crawled into a temple to die, steeping the last dull interval in idle admiration of sculptured Artemis’ (CT, vol. I, pp. 90, 96). The moon-chastity associations of the goddess are further devalued and ironized when Lizzie, on Jack’s return, has been gazing at a fitful moon, and Mr Bruce, her new suitor, appears to accuse her of being ‘moonstruck’ (CT, vol. I, p. 92), the comment dismissively undermining Lizzie’s standing even further. As if querying the popular fictional commonplace of the faithful girl at home awaiting her beloved, she seems ready, at the end of the tale, to abandon the virgin state of the Greek deity. Her physical beauty can only be inferred from the lines of a stone sculpture contained within that passing trope.24 Of much greater totemic power is Jack’s ‘old army blanket’ which Lizzie finds and wraps around herself. She sits on the verandah, looking up at the windy night sky and ‘the bright moon, careering in their midst, seemed to have wandered forth in frantic quest of the hidden stars’. In a much less conventional mode suggesting James’s fascination with the experience of war and its conferring of masculinity, she inhales its pungent, foreign odour: ‘A strange earthy smell lingered in that faded old rug, and with it a faint perfume of tobacco. Instantly the young girl’s senses were transported as they had never been before to those far-off Southern battlefields. She saw men lying in swamps, puffing their kindly pipes, drawing their blankets closer, canopied with the same luminous dusk that shone down upon her comfortable weakness’ (CT, vol. I, p. 91). Her chastened recog-

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nition of ‘comfortable weakness’, in being so far from battle, parallels James’s own passive and observing role: in his diminished masculinity, he has earned none of the insignia of battle, as he will recount in Notes of a Son and Brother, written nearly fifty years later. The tale ends with the death of Jack Ford and Lizzie Crowe’s ambiguous dismissal of the new suitor. All of these Civil War tales challenge prevailing conventions. Jack has said that, in the event of his death, he does not wish her to be amongst bereaved widows and sweethearts, to avoid the ‘tawdry sentiment’ of being ‘“constant to my memory”’ (CT, vol. I, p. 53). By thus denying the possibility of a romantic if tragic resolution of faithful lovers separated by death, James refuses to surrender his admired soldier figures to a future of heterosexual orthodoxy, preferring to preserve them within a fictional, homosocial fraternity in death or life. In a form of triangulation these young men may gather round a charming female, but the moments of subjectivity, of intuition which circumvents the apparent gender dynamics of a scene, are often exclusively male affairs. Subversive devices of this kind would characterize the later fiction: a moment in that revelatory tale of James’s own middle years, ‘The Middle Years’, illustrates how illusory a scene may be. The novelist hero, Dencombe, is a revelation of James himself – his creative, sexual, dissatisfied, questing self, in that curiously suggestive self-characterization: ‘a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style; the last thing he ever arrived at was a form final for himself ’.25 He watches a scene on the beach below him, an older woman with a younger female dependant, followed by a young man absorbed in a book. His orthodox reading of the scene as involving a romance between the two young people is ironically dismantled by events. The young man is a doctor in attendance; the novel he reads with such attention is Dencombe’s own, and he will become the older man’s ‘admirer’. A tale of 1867, ‘Poor Richard’, deploys a similar evasive strategy whereby a small group of men engage in a mutual subjectivity which is legitimized by the presence of a woman, Gertrude Whittaker, who would have been ‘positively plain’, but for her smile. The ‘impassioned and beautiful youth’ (CT, vol. I, p. 191) of the title who is in love with her will somehow prove himself worthy of more than friendship by ‘making himself a man’ (CT, vol. I, p. 203). When reprimanded, he gazes at her ‘out of his dark eyes’ (CT, vol. I, p. 201). She considers that Captain Severn, twenty-eight years old and wounded in the war, might be a good influence on the young man. She is fond of the captain herself, but the potential relationship is reduced (once again) to literary commonplace: she characterizes herself as a ‘millionaire Maud Müller’ (CT, vol. I, p. 207), reversing the social positions of the Whittier poem in which a brief encounter between a humble country girl and a passing young judge is forever remembered and regretted by both. Richard realizes that indeed the captain is in love with Gertrude, but, like the situation in the poem, it is a case simply of what ‘might have

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been’. Richard’s insight transcends accepted masculine boundaries and indeed, in a reciprocal moment of intuition when the two observe a third suitor, Severn sees that Richard loves her. Major Luttrel is a recruiting officer, drawn to Gertrude’s wealth. The three men enact a series of scenes with the woman at the nominal centre, yet the mutual physical awareness between the men largely transcends their relations with her. The two military men ‘eye’ Richard ‘with some curiosity’, noting ‘his careless garments, his pale, handsome face, his dark, mistrustful eyes’. The young man can be reduced to a state of anger and silence, the loser in a competition ‘to shine and to outshine natural to clever men who find themselves concurring to the entertainment of a young and agreeable woman’ (CT, vol. I, pp. 208–9), a situation doubtless reflecting the dynamics of the circle which gathered around Mary Temple. Richard is a non-combatant – as if James has returned to his own role within that group of young war veterans drawn to his female cousin. As Leon Edel suggests, ‘his was the consolation of the observer; with it, however, was the awareness – and it appears to have been acute – that his relationship to Minny in the circumstances was somewhat less than masculine. The “emanation the most masculine” came from the veterans of the Civil War ….’26 Inspired to work on the land, to prove himself to Gertrude, Richard is temporarily ennobled by hard work and thus achieves manhood. She comes upon this ‘native barbarian’ while out riding: ‘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’. She holds out ‘her gloved fingers to his brown, dusty hand’ (CT, vol. I, p. 221). Yet the episode is short-lived; in a key moment of the story, Richard conspires with Luttrel to trick Severn who has come to say farewell (and perhaps to propose) to Gertrude before leaving for war by telling him that she is away from home. In their ensuing guilt, the two argue bitterly and the older man declares (unexpectedly) that he is not afraid of ‘“those big black eyes of yours”’ (CT, vol. I, p. 231). Richard is further feminized as he begins to weep and begs his companion to take him home. A long illness follows (allowing Luttrel to court Gertrude) as if further weakening his gender status, though, of course, confirming his position within the series of romanticized young and fragile males cherished by James. Visiting him and noticing ‘the young man’s gaunt shoulders … his face, so livid and aquiline … his great dark eyes’, Luttrel senses Richard’s vulnerability, realizing paradoxically that ‘an invincible spirit had been sent from a better world to breathe confusion upon his hopes’ (CT, vol. I, p. 247). Within a gender-oriented subjectivity, men interpret each other in a mutuality of emotion, silences and glances, which undercut the protective or misleading formality of conventional interchange. As Richard watches his beloved Gertude talking to Luttrel, he notices his companion, the ill-fated Severn, and sees ‘his own feelings reflected in the Captain’s face; that is, he discovered there an incipi-

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ent jealousy. Severn too was in love!’ (CT, vol. I, p. 210). Both Captain Severn and Richard enter into a tacit understanding. They even find a startling reflection of their own unhappiness as they read each other’s faces. Gertrude and Luttrel walk ahead of them in conversation. In its preoccupation with men’s eyes, lips (upon which it seems almost to hang) and sighs (the emblems of stereotypical romantic preoccupation), the discourse hints at a transgressive, parallel narrative. The real intimacy here is exchanged between men: the Captain’s eyes … were following Gertrude’s slow steps. Richard saw that he could learn more from them than from any further oral declaration, for something in the lips beneath them seemed to indicate that they had judged themselves to have said enough, and they were obviously not the lips of a simpleton. As he thus deferred, with unwonted courtesy, to the Captain’s silence, and transferred his gaze sympathetically to Gertrude’s shapely shoulders and to her listening ear, he gave utterance to a tell-tale sigh – a sigh which there was no mistaking. Severn looked about; it was now his turn to probe a little. ‘Good heavens’, he exclaimed, ‘that boy is in love with her!’ (CT, vol. I, p. 212).

Later, in this same scene, Gertrude herself is included in a comic tableau which further extends the circuit of silent observation. Trying to recover from a churlish sulk, Richard launches on a description of the river running by the house until he finally stops, ‘feeling that he had given proof of his manhood’. He turns to Gertrude: But she was looking at Captain Severn, under the impression that Richard had secured his auditor, Severn was looking at Luttrel, and Luttrel at Miss Whittaker; and all were apparently so deep in observation that they had marked neither his speech nor his silence. ‘Truly’, thought the young man, ‘I’m well out of the circle!’ (CT, vol. I, pp. 213–14).

Despite his ‘beauty’ and the darkness of his eyes – assets to which the veterans themselves are not blind – Richard cannot succeed in love. He has been too boyish at the start and, by the end, having enlisted and survived the war, has affirmed his manliness with a consequent sacrifice of intuition. Having achieved ‘a gallantry’, he now thinks of himself rather than her; James hints at Gertrude’s increasingly deferent role which means that Richard is unable to ‘read in her lingering, upward gaze that he had won her’. The tale ends with a faltering denial of heterosexual conformity, as if James himself is unable to endorse or imagine such a conclusion. Severn (against whom the other two males temporarily conspire) returns to the war and is killed. Luttrel, rejected by Gertrude, loses an arm in battle and marries a rich girl from Philadelphia. For Richard, ‘the past had closed abruptly behind him, and poor tardy Gertrude had been shut in’ (CT, vol. I, p. 256). He hopes ‘to try his fortunes in the West’, following a traditional path in the style of a ‘Masculine Primitive’.27 Gertrude, ‘nearly thirty years of age’, leaves

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for a single life in Florence and ‘continued celibacy’ (CT, vol. I, p. 258) – a case, perhaps, of ‘poor Gertrude’ as well as ‘poor Richard’. Like the doomed Captain Jack Ford in ‘The Story of a Year’, Colonel Ferdinand Mason, the twenty-seven-year-old hero of ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’, has been ‘reduced to a shadow in the service of his country’ (CT, vol. I, p. 337). The war has just ended and the tale opens in the spring of 1865 with Mason languishing in ‘one of the great New York hotels’, a location, of course, which would serve James as exemplifying a facet of American society in his twentieth-century writing. Mason’s widow aunt, ‘the first woman he has seen in many months’, takes him off to her home two hours away up the Hudson Valley for her ‘little turn at hero-nursing’ (CT, vol. I, pp. 321–3). Treated by an excellent young doctor, a veteran like himself, Mason improves, only to be struck down when he is told that his aunt’s niece and charge, Miss Hofmann, with whom he has quietly fallen in love, is to marry the doctor. He rapidly declines, arranging for the young couple to inherit his estate before he dies. The tale subjects what has become for James an established link between masculinity and the soldier to a deeper scrutiny. As Mason lies in his hotel room, ‘undressed, unshaven, weak, very feverish’ (CT, vol. I, p. 321), his manservant tells him: ‘“Upon my word, sir, you look beautiful”’. The startling statement, with both gender and social hierarchy reinforced by ‘sir’, is much more characteristic of the risk-taking suggestiveness of the later James. The insight emphasizes the sacrificial nature of Mason’s undefined illness (a ‘disorder … obstinate and virulent’ (CT, vol. I, p. 329)), as if he were a Christ-like figure in a Pietà, but it invokes too the erotic appeal of the wounded, fragile male which occupied James’s imagination. The blunt declaration is quickly normalized as the servant adds (while continuing to preserve the solidarity of gender) that it is women who ‘“like a sick man”’. His aunt’s arrival reconfirms this restored masculinity when she exclaims, ‘“What a great full-grown young fellow you have become!”’ (CT, vol. I, p. 323). Yet when she leaves, as if reminded of an earlier boyhood self, Mason manages to resist holding her dress and asking her not to go. Listening to her retreating footsteps, he weeps, ‘reminded of the exquisite side of life’ (CT, vol. I, p. 326). Ironically, when installed in his aunt’s Hudson Valley home, Mason, frustrated and satiated with exclusively female society, must turn to another man. The first prospective local doctor, ‘a practitioner of the old school’, is rejected: ‘anything brought about by the war would be quite out of his range’. Dr Knight, a former army surgeon, known to Mason during the war, ‘a young man of good birth, good looks, good faculties and good intentions’ (CT, vol. I, pp. 327–8), proves to have ‘medical skill’ leaving ‘nothing to be desired’. Knight gently touches upon the psychology of Mason’s illness when he comments, ‘“You have opposed no resistance; you haven’t cared to get well”’. Mason confesses his former misery and

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the contrast with his current circumstances. Had he known of his unhappiness, Knight would have taken him home with him after the war: the ‘prospect’ had not been ‘rose-coloured’. The doctor looks round the room and archly adds, in gender-based conspiracy, ‘“I have never seen anything so pink”’. The homosocial bond is sustained as he comments that Mason’s ‘“especial blessing”’ was his servant: ‘“He looks as if he had come out of an English novel”’. The characterization is comically turned as Mason asks if he has met Miss Hofmann. The doctor has, and thinks (unflatteringly) that ‘“she looks as if she had come out an American novel”’ (CT, vol. I, pp. 329–30). In a later conversation which strangely anticipates a comparable scene in James’s last tale, ‘A Round of Visits’, Mason advances the intimacy with his doctor and confides that, in this house run by women, he is ‘“dying of kindness”’; ‘“Ah, gammon”’, the doctor replies in an untypical colloquialism (its archaic meanings include talk, chatter, humbug or ridiculous nonsense), reinforcing their male closeness and a degree of sexual contempt. Mason unburdens himself, not because Knight is his ‘medical adviser’, but because of his gender and a stated, almost yearning belief in the exclusive, comforting potential of same-sex understanding: ‘“You’re a man”’ he pursued, laying his hand on his companion’s arm. ‘“There’s nothing here but women – heaven reward them! I am saturated with whispers and perfumes and smiles, and the rustling of dresses. It takes a man to understand a man”’ (CT, vol. I, p. 340). The doctor reciprocates in a further gesture of gender solidarity: a touch is followed by a look, a development marked by a shift from the patient’s surname (the soldier he has known) to forename: ‘He placed his hand on Mason’s arm and shook it gently, while Ferdinand met his gaze’. Knight sustains this male intimacy by devolving power and abandoning a professional role by lapsing into flirtatious, wry coyness: ‘If you don’t get well’, said Knight, – ‘if you don’t get well –’ And he paused. ‘What will be the consequence?’ asked Ferdinand, still laughing. ‘I shall hate you; I shall think you did it on purpose’. ‘What shall I care for your hating me?’ ‘I shall tell people that you were a poor spiritless creature – that you are no loss’. ‘I give you leave’, said Ferdinand (CT, vol. I, p. 341).

In contrast with these scenes of gender loyalty and solicitude, of males caring for each other (in both senses), the corresponding female dynamics seem ruthless and unforgiving, reflecting a sexual distaste evident even in James’s latest fiction. The matriarchal Mrs Mason scans her social circle and scorns the predatory nature of the young marriageable woman and her desire for pleasure at whatever cost. The young colonel proves popular at a local ball and risks exceeding his strength: ‘“Was there ever anything like the avidity of these dreadful girls?”’, she

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asks, before condemning a ‘“little Miss Masters”’: ‘“What does she care, so long as she makes her evening? They like a man to look as if he were going to die – it’s interesting”’ (CT, vol. I, p. 364). Even the admired Miss Hofmann momentarily assumes a siren-like role on the banks of the Hudson River. She has taken Mason for a recuperative drive and they are guided to a vantage point by a poor immigrant child to whom Miss Hofmann speaks in his native German. In his infirmity Mason must remain on his bench but she descends to the shore of the river: She was sitting on a rock, on the narrow margin of sand, with her hat in her lap, twisting the feather in her fingers. In a few moments it seemed to Ferdinand that he caught the tones of her voice, wafted upward as if she were gently singing. He listened intently, and at last succeeded in distinguishing several words, [ James’s punctuation] they were German. ‘Confound her German!’ thought the young man.

She has become a New World version of the mythological young women of appropriately German myth, perched on the Lorelei rock, luring sailors to their deaths in the Rhine. On a more mundane yet equally suggestive level the invalid crossly points out, on her return, that she has torn her dress, despite his warning. When asked to indicate where, ‘Mason 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’ (CT, vol. I, p. 350). The symbolism of inappropriate, bungled penetration, of ineffectual physical contact with delicate fabric deepens the tale’s disturbing sexual dynamics. Indeed, one might measure James’s lack of interest in the girl’s interior life by his bland reference to her reaction: the gesture merely ‘attracted’ her ‘attention’. He is close to making a declaration of love, yet Mason has consistently discounted his own masculinity with grim irony, further surrendering power to the females who look after him. In this genteel company, he hints at his emasculation: ‘“to fall in love a man must be all there, and you see I am not”’ and, if he were to dance, it would only be the ‘dance of death’; ‘a man was not to go a-wooing in his dressing gown and slippers’ (CT, vol. I, pp. 335, 343, 347). Yet Ferdinand Mason realizes too an emotionally stalled development quite distinct from any physical injury, suggesting an autobiographical anxiety on James’s part. He has been obsessed with work and the fleeting passage of time so that, at twenty-seven, he is a ‘dunce in certain social matters’ (CT, vol. I, p. 331). As a consequence, his manhood is compromised and he lives under a gender-based regime arranged under the ‘uncontested dominion of women’ (CT, vol. I, p. 327). After the dance which he has not been able to attend, Mason is informed by Knight that Miss Hofmann (whom the doctor will eventually marry) ‘“seemed to have something of the inviolable strength of a goddess … She wears her artificial roses and dew-drops as if she had gathered them on the mountain-tops

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instead of buying them in Broadway. She moves with long steps, her dress rustles, and to a man of fancy it’s the sound of Diana on the forest-leaves”’ (CT, vol. I, p. 345). Miss Hofmann has been deified and mythologized, an idealization available only to ‘a man of fancy’. Yet this goddess of the woods and figure of eternal chastity implicitly reduces men, if not to an emasculated state, then to irrelevance. Her womanhood is constituted conveniently for James, making no demands on – indeed uninterested in – a man’s body. Correspondingly, the synthetic ‘fancy’ which has largely desexed Miss Hofmann shows no interest in her physical reality: her ‘long steps’ offer no competition to Jack Ford’s ‘calm swinging stride’ in engaging James’s attention as something worth watching. The young women of these Civil War tales can, for all their good intentions, wear men out with their superficial attentions or consign them to death by their infidelity. More tellingly and simply, perhaps, they disappoint. Reflecting the narrative of James’s own desires, on the other hand, the young soldiers offer models of a masculinity which find it easy to transgress, in levels of intimacy and mutual intuition, conventional codes. It is only, as Lowell declaims in his memorial ‘Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, 21 July 1865’ (a poem much admired by James), the dead who may come, transfigured back, Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, Beautiful evermore, and with the rays Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation!28

Those who survive are subject to more mundane trials, though even with the pallor of illness and lingering injury they excite James’s romantic attention. This is where the real interest of these uneven stories lies – in their dramatization of subversive emotion. Alfred Habegger, who interprets James in the context of the popular women writers of the time – the ‘agonists’ who wrote of unhappy women and loveless marriages – regards these stories as ‘a remarkably polished effort to put his own experience totally out of the question’. Showing little regard for the nuances and elliptical messages of these tales (the medium where James’s ‘own experience’ may emerge), and disconnecting James from these narratives which discredit women, Habegger sees ‘The Story of a Year’ and ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’ as revealing that ‘the modern American woman’s abandonment of her redemptive mission – her refusal to be affectionate, faithful, refined – will destroy the man who trusts her, especially if he is a traditional man still loyal to the claims of honor in war and polite society. James began as the agonist’s antagonist’.29 This is broadly true to the critical portrait of American womanhood which the tales offer, but James’s agenda arises from private anxieties rather than any attempt at sociological analysis. Habegger’s terms – James’s early fiction regarded as a ‘program of transformation, his ‘writing in opposition to … current

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trends’, his desire to ‘demonstrate’, his stories’ ‘declaring’ – remorselessly accentuate a public, intentional and conscious motivation. It is clear that in fictionalizing the sadnesses and romances attaching to war, James was aware of popular trends and conventions of the 1860s. Yet the more lasting interest of these tales relates to a more submerged narrative and its revelation of the desires and anxieties of the young James, who was absorbed by the varieties of masculinity, fetishizing its physical attractions, at other times feminizing himself as well (self-indulgently) as his object of desire. In discussing three other tales, Howard Feinstein suggests that ‘Henry James’s early stories can be read as the creation of a young artist who had become painfully aware of himself as a female consciousness masquerading in the body of a man’.30 In the light of more recent discussion of ‘gender intelligibility’ and the extent (highly variable) to which ‘for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender’31 this reading begs certain questions. Yet however dismissive Feinstein’s comment may seem in terms of the complex shading of the subjective self which can be derived from this early fiction, it helps us understand how – whatever Habegger’s conclusions about woman’s abandoning of her inspirational role – she really has no chance with James, contained as she is within a triangulated pattern, the means for men to engage in a transgressive exercise of homoerotic desire. The mythologized figure of the Civil War soldier, on the other hand, would be revisited and reimagined lovingly to the end of James’s writing life, a companion or cousin romanticized by the mantle of war – the real subject of this ‘unwritten history’ to be revealed in ‘the reverse of the picture’, and a beloved object belonging to his nostalgia for America.

7 ‘DOING SOMETHING’ FOR THE SOLDIERS OF THE CIVIL WAR

In the fiction James was to write after the early Civil War tales, the figure of the soldier disappears and the subject of the war, with the exception of several references in The Bostonians, is only occasionally touched upon in a silence which lasted for about forty years. It is not until the late discursive and autobiographical writing of his final decade, his extended return to America and later exposure to the letters of family and friends dating from the 1860s, that James once more considers his early years in New York and New England, and the war which changed the national consciousness. In the revelatory and expressive detail of A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) he returns to the period of his youth and invests in the figure of the soldier, both abstract and individualized, his feelings for young men and their place in the national history. They constitute, for James, the Civil War, their heroism and beauty the object of his admiration, and their premature deaths the motive for his ‘memorializing’ them. In a variety of roles he, at this late and emboldened stage, will serve these young men, humbly and in a ‘brothering’ capacity as well as restoring their bodies through the erotic potential of his discourse; in a sequence of portraits he will, indeed, ‘do something’ for them. ‘The Story of a Year’, ‘An Extraordinary Case’ and ‘Poor Richard’ were never revived by James for the New York Edition (in common with all the other short stories published before 1871), but, in a sense, he would revise the messages they contain and access once more their romantic emotions as he ‘sounded’, or ‘– if rather terrible the image – “dragged”’ the past in the powerful reminiscences completed in his last years.1 During his 1904–5 stay in Boston James recorded his admiration for the sculptures of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the official seals on the front façade of the Public Library, as well as his ‘noble and exquisite monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts’ (AS, p. 250). Boston’s memorial to the dead of the Civil War is located on Beacon Street, on the edge of the Common opposite the Massachusetts State House. The Fifty-fourth was famous not least for being a regiment of black volunteer soldiers commanded by white officers, one of whom was James’s brother Wilky, led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, ‘fairest of young commanders’ – 98 –

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(Aut, p. 457), a son of strongly abolitionist Boston parents who was killed at the age of twenty-six in the engagement in which Wilky James was badly injured.2 There are other family associations. The Saint-Gaudens monument was unveiled on 31 May 1897 and William James was just one of a number of eminent New England speakers at the event.3 In a letter to his brother, Henry James associates the sculpture and the civic ceremony to present it to Boston (at which he excitedly ‘jubilates’) with Wilky, who had died in 1883. He is in England, but he imagines the benign returning presence of his younger brother: ‘even poor dear, dead Wilkie will be there, poor boy; and I can’t help figuring it as a sort of beautiful, poetic justice to him’.4 The crowded soldiers in the bronze high relief are viewed, in the manner of a classical frieze, from the side, and they move from left to right, compacted together as in a painting of a Renaissance military or battle scene. Above them floats a horizontal female robed figure, seemingly guiding and directing them onward, and believed to be an Angel of Death. The soldiers have no engagement with the observer, looking unself-consciously towards some other future.5 Wilky’s return from South Carolina in the late summer of 1863 in the middle of the Civil War, a scene re-enacted in ‘The Story of a Year’, is most fully recalled in Notes of a Son and Brother. In its silence and self-containment, its protagonists otherwise preoccupied and oblivious to observation, the episode in the autobiography assumes a sculptural form, as if the novelist proposes a more private companion piece to the Saint-Gaudens monument whose ‘image’, as he recalls, was set aloft ‘on the spot of their vividest passing’ (Aut, p. 423). To the elderly James the episode, introduced by an almost endless sentence, appears as ‘clear as some object presented in high relief against the evening sky of the west’ (Aut, p. 383). When the severely wounded Wilky James was brought home from Fort Wagner, Charleston,6 his stretcher was tended on the long journey by W. C. Russell, the father of his ‘closest brother-in-arms’ (Aut, p. 423), Cabot Russell, who had died in the same unsuccessful engagement. With a fleeting play of homoerotic association typical of James’s late manner on the idea of the phrase ‘brother-in-arms’ involving male solidarity and a pun on ‘arms’, he leaves the stillness and mystery of sculpture to offer a memorial narrative, following the father in his task of searching for the lost body. Having failed to find, ‘up and down the searched field’, ‘his own irrecoverable boy – then dying or dead, as afterwards appeared, well within the enemy’s works’, Russell had instead brought home the young James son.7 This commemoration, founded on family and domestic history, stresses distinctions between youth and age, the lucky and the unfortunate – the father sitting ‘erect and dry-eyed at the guarded feast of our relief ’ and the lost, energetically idealized son, ‘my brother’s so close comrade – dark-eyed, youthfully brown, heartily bright, actively handsome’, his physical perfection itemized in James’s memory. In the absence of that Boston monument – or with sculpture relegated to a figurative medium – imagination and memory may serve, however ‘ruefully’ or helplessly, to retrieve these

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transfigured beings. The dead Cabot Russell shares ‘the arrested expression, the indefinable shining stigma, worn, to the regard that travels back to them, by those of the young figures of the fallen that memory and fancy, wanting, never ceasing to want, to “do” something for them, set as upright and clear-faced as may be, each in his sacred niche’ (Aut, pp. 383–4). What James will ‘do’ for the dead of the Civil War is contained in the extended meditations on the American soldier, compacted into a single ‘figure of romance’ (Aut, p. 424), available and displayed in the permanence of his reminiscences. The activity of recollection no less importantly reconstructs a version of his own role at this time, inscribing the conviction of difference he experienced, along with the privileges of a temporary sense of unity and belonging. The act of memorial also rehearses facets of the desire James felt and continues to feel not merely for a named individual – Cabot Russell, or a friend like Oliver Wendell Holmes, the ‘so handsome young man’ awaiting ‘a greater eminence’ and a national role, but for the soldier in the mass, whatever his mood – indeed a fidelity to the disembodied, radiant or suffering abstraction of the American soldier. James forestalls the reader when touching the dark, interior side of the soldier’s experience, ‘his wasted melancholy’, by invoking ‘the tender elegiac tone’ of Walt Whitman (Aut, p. 422). At the outbreak of war James had enrolled on a law course at Harvard – his own form of decisive action; his immediate model for self-effacing compassion was Professor Child, who sat across from him at Miss Upham’s Cambridge breakfast table in the Balzacian lodgings of his one year of student life. Whilst the landlady confines herself to checking the ‘temperature of her plats’, Professor Child is the ‘vivid clock-face’ before whom James diminishes himself – ‘I set … the small tick of my own poor watch by it’ (Aut, p. 428) – establishing a model domesticated and feminized. When the ‘local colour of the War broke in’ (Aut, p. 420), Child becomes a ‘fond, grave guardian … of the promise, in all its flower, of the sacrificial young men’ who had ‘passed through his hands’, showing a ‘tenderness of interest, a nursing pride’, which James finds ‘contagious’ (Aut, p. 428). The war has become ‘our public story’, elevating its spectators, and imagined as an epic event, ‘stretching now into volume after volume of the very biggest print’. Everything, ‘even indirectly touched’ by the recorded events of the Civil War is ennobled – its human, intimate dimension, the ‘thousand menaced affections and connections’, illuminated as ‘from a waving torch’ (Aut, pp. 420–1). Despite the curiously defined location, the fictional European, Old-World associations of Balzac – he finds himself in presence of matters ‘consistently American’, realizing that his ‘American consciousness’ has so far been ‘starved’ (Aut, p. 418). In a further conflation of public and private narrative, James locates his own reassimilation within the most decisive event of America’s nineteenth-century history, signalled compellingly and seductively by the figure of the soldier. Fol-

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lowing Child, this ‘fond, grave guardian’, he finds ‘matter enough everywhere for gaping’, betraying a form of sexual abjection as he gazes on the desired object, and assuming a willing subservience, never failing to pick up ‘a single brush, a scattered leaf, of their growing or their riper legend’. Childs has created for him the ‘tone’ for considering those fallen in battle, once ‘the right touch had handed them over to my restless claim’ (Aut, pp. 428–9).8 A visit to convalescent and recuperating soldiers at Portsmouth Grove, recalled over forty years after the event, still retains for him in ‘the prodigiously subjective side of the experience’, ‘the grand air of an adventure’, quite surpassing the arbitrary, commonplace name of its setting. Unlike ‘European designations’, the American place name is regarded as haphazard and thus forgettable, ‘the “faked” label, growing but as by a dab of glue on an article of trade’. Yet despite the synthetic associations of the place, the experience is profound, providing ‘a “contact” with the active drama’ – the war itself – which transcends the more commonplace, if tantalizing ‘affair of every day’, ‘the brush of interest against the soldier single and salient’. The physical, tactile references express a desire for the body of the American soldier. The visit, for James, ‘somehow corresponds for memory’ with the poems of Walt Whitman and the figure of the soldier he was to ‘commemorate’ (Aut, pp. 421–2). The poet derided in that early review of Drum Taps is reinstated (however inappropriately, given their disproportionate activities) as a kind of legitimizing model for self-denying service to the wounded soldier. In thinking of memory, and the power of ‘certain single hours or compressed groups of hours’ to survive and live on ‘in the cabinet of intimate reference, the museum, as it were, of the soul’s curiosities’, James signals the poignancy of the event which transcends even the cheapness of the place name which he repeats. Indeed in his ‘queer cluster’ of memories ‘that flower of the connection which answers to the name of Portsmouth Grove still overtops other members of its class, so that to finger it again for a moment is to make it perceptibly exhale its very principle of life’ (Aut, pp. 423–4). Contained within these images of efflorescence and largeness, touching and release, and a part of this caressing fantasy, the wounded and suffering soldiers become perfumed and beautiful, a further variant on the cherished illnesses of young men and their consequent fragility which become eroticized in his latest fiction. The Portsmouth Grove trip, ‘so piously, so tenderly made’ (Aut, p. 421), leaves James lost for words to express the beauty which he sees. The memory hints at the vivid light effects of some grand panoramic military painting: ‘the American soldier in his multitude was the most attaching and effecting and withal the most amusing figure of romance conceivable … as the afternoon light of the place and time lingered upon him, both to the seeming enhancement of his quality and of its own, romance of a more confused kind than I shall now attempt words for attended his every movement’. In this elaborately romantic scene, the corporate

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figure of the soldier, caught in the sunlight, seems transfigured, even, in a swift hyperbole, beautifying the light itself. He may seem inaccessible and inarticulate, taking refuge in self-deprecation and jocularity, yet, like the young Virginian in The American Scene, he must surrender to James’s blandishments as the writer is shudderingly and superlatively embarrassed to recall: ‘It was the charmingest, touchingest, dreadfullest thing in the world that my impression of him should have to be somehow of his abandonment to a rueful humour, to a stoic reserve which could yet melt, a relation with him once established, into a rich communicative confidence’. He listens to each ‘troubled tale’ told in ‘the very poetry of the esoteric vernacular’, seals ‘the beautiful tie’ with an offer of money, leaving, having established a relationship ‘even to the pitch of the last tenderness of friendship’ (Aut, p. 424). He avowedly brings no less of ‘the consecrating sentiment’ than ‘the good Walt’ himself, though he concedes that he was not ‘armed with oranges and peppermints’. Whitman had participated in ‘the common Americanism of his hospital friends’ and James confesses to longing for the pleasures of easy relations (invoking ‘freedom’ and ‘pleasure’ for the ‘kindly mind’) which derive from ‘homogeneity and its entailed fraternity’. Access to this mystery which seems likely to disclose nationhood, of knowing ‘what an American at least was’, derives from these old ‘brothering’ conditions (the brother in one’s arms once more), facilitating male friendship and intimacy. Owing to ‘our national theory of absorption, assimilation and conversion’ (Aut, pp. 424–5) such cultural simplicities of identity and recognition have now been confirmed by James as what might seem a fantasy of requited companionship between men – a situation replicated perhaps in his continuing friendships with young men whilst domiciled in Edwardian England. Yet if the profuseness of twentieth-century America baffles him, he finds a more coherent message in a comically concrete exercise of memory; he puts his ear, ‘doctor-fashion, to the breast of time – or say as the subtle savage puts his to the ground’ (Aut, p. 482) when he can just catch ‘some vibratory hum’ of that period of his young manhood fifty years earlier. The practice of nationhood, ‘Americanism’, includes for James in these late years of his life when male friendship is so expressly valued, possibilities which Europe failed to offer – the war itself a landscape for homoerotic intimacy, a remembered, perhaps illusory brotherhood. Visiting Wilky at Readville training camp, south of Boston, James is surprised at his brother’s accomplishments. It seems to him, in a notion recalling the early Civil War stories, ‘a fairy-tale’ that Wilky, this companion of his childhood, should now have mastered ‘such mysteries, such engines, such arts’. He feels himself to be gaping ‘as at shining revels’ and indeed the scene develops as a bright summer canvas crowded, exclusively, with young men transformed into happy spirits on some Elysian field. The memory is packed with information,

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celebrating (far-removed from any association of war) the physical beauties of the living world, ‘a picture, an interplay of bright breezy air and high shantycovered 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’. The episode takes on in this cumulative revelation of ever more handsome and more masculine men (of appropriate social class too) the qualities of a homoerotic dream-fantasy. Even at this distance of time he is embarrassed at his own superfluousness, his inability to ‘“do things”’ in this gathering of defined roles and tasks determining masculinity; yet he continued to ‘hang about … verily to desperation’, snatching this ‘opportunity for gapings the liveliest … admirations the crudest’ (Aut, pp. 456–7), with his language challenging judgment. On such an occasion, as he points out, he must have had in this ‘charming composition’ his ‘all so emphasised vision of handsome young Cabot Russell’ (Aut, p. 423), soon to be ‘irrecoverably lost’. Beyond the observational intensity of the Readville visit, his tenderly Whitmanesque treatment of the wounded men at Portsmouth Grove leads James to identify the injury he sustained which may have compromised his own enlisting not only as a counterpart to the injuries of the men he visited but with the corporate trauma of the war itself. The date and nature of the injury are clouded, partly by James himself as well as in the indirection of his prose style, but most sources have agreed that he hurt his back whilst helping extinguish a Newport fire in 1861 and that he suffered from this ‘horrid even if … obscure hurt’ for a number of years as a consequence.9 In Notes of a Son and Brother the injury arising from ‘twenty odious minutes’ serves as little less than a badge of honour in his studied yoking of a ‘private catastrophe’ with the ‘great public convulsion’ and he strives pointedly to clarify this ‘least clearly expressible’ association, a ‘queer fusion or confusion established in my consciousness’. With what may be little more than a rhetorical gesture he characterizes this fusion as ‘beyond all present notation’, whilst inflating the terms for this ‘passage of personal history’: the accident is ‘a single vast visitation’, contributing to ‘a huge comprehensive ache’. That ‘physical mishap’ coincides in the memoir with ‘Mr Lincoln’s … call for volunteers’, initiating a succession of effects which would ‘draw themselves out incalculably and intolerably’. Simply, his accident is assimilated into ‘the country at large’ – part of its universal suffering (Aut, pp. 414–15). The war has inscribed its message on his own young body. In visiting this convalescent camp which appears to James ‘a body rent with a thousand wounds’, he confesses ‘a sort of tragic fellowship’.10 In accordance with this formulation in which the individual embodies the national destiny, his year of study at law school becomes his national service: his having to lie down ‘book in hand’, because of his back pain, offered a ‘certain fine plausibil-

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ity’, ‘something definitely and firmly parallel to action in the tented field’, his Law School peers producing ‘the illusion of a mustered army’ (Aut, p. 417). James must pay ‘physically’ for this excursion, as he realizes on the evening steamboat back to Newport from Plymouth Grove. Now positioned ‘in too scant rest on a deck stool and against the bulwark’ (Aut, p. 426), he seems to reenact the circumstances of the original accident in which he had been ‘jammed into the acute angle between two high fences’ (Aut, p. 415). But, more importantly, the remembered physical discomfort links him, mystically, to the men he has left behind. He has his own source of pain (an emblem of heroism) which justifies his admission to this all-male community. He recalls ‘a strange rapture’; in ‘measuring wounds against wounds’, he participates at their side in ‘the common fact of endurance’ (Aut, p. 426). The atmospheric twilight journey moving into ‘the lucid charm of the night’ is interrupted continuously by protestations against the clumsiness of the medium; to one for whom the ‘impression’ is a primary source such an incapacity suggests the tenuous claim of the comparison. He cannot pretend to be ‘clear’, ‘coherent’ or ‘logical’ with such ‘individual’ or ‘supersubtle’ memories; they are ‘too peculiar for notation’ and he ruefully fears ‘ridicule if they are overstated’. The unease signalled in his claiming a communion of suffering with the young men at Plymouth Grove continues to the chapter’s ending in cadences marked by assertive abstraction: ‘the hour seemed, by some wondrous secret, to know itself marked and charged and unforgettable – hinting so in its very own terms of cool beauty at something portentous in it, an exquisite claim then and there for lasting value and high authority’ (Aut, p. 427). With the end of the war comes James’s finding, or confirmation, of a professional vocation. Having published unsigned critical pieces in the North American Review in 1864, he brought out ‘The Story of a Year’ in Fields’s Atlantic Monthly in March 1865 for a fee of twelve dollars. He records modestly how he made the ‘sudden sweet discovery’ that he might ‘acceptably stammer a style’. The memory is characterized by images of tasty nourishment and reflective colour in ‘positive historic iridescence’ as he retrieves that Boston period and pulls out ‘a plum from under the tooth of time’, recalling ‘the strongest savour of the feast’ as he reveals that it is ‘with the fumes of a feast it comes back’. The recalled prospect of a future in writing is associated with ‘the very taste of the war as ending or ended’ (Aut, p. 488). Unexpectedly and paradoxically, the ‘images of military experience’ – or the chance of seeing a soldier – increased with the ‘break-up of the vast veteran Army’. Relishing that pleasure, James recollects the influx of transformed young men, the ‘monster tide’ of ‘bronzed, matured faces’ and ‘bronzed, matured characters’. In a conviction of difference he can only see and smell – another pleasure in this period of self-indulgent feasting of the senses when the ‘very smell of having so served was somehow, at least to my supersensitive nostril, in the larger and

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cooler air, where it might have been an emanation, the most masculine, the most communicative as to associated far-off things’ (Aut, p. 489). The abandoned military impedimenta, redolent of manliness and physical endurance, the ‘worn toggery put off ’, ‘old army-cloth and other fittings at a discount’, the ‘swordbelts and buckles’, the ‘myriad saturated articles’, have become available for fetishistic contemplation, valorized by evidence of use and wear. It was a period when ‘life was ever so handsomely reinforced’ and refreshingly varied and multiplied with ‘the discharge upon society of such an amount of out-of-the-way experience’. The fact of a man’s having ‘soldiered’ (indeed, a ‘happy man’) could not fail to ‘count’, and, to the observing James, to answer to ‘one’s own need to interpret’: America has been granted ‘unprecedented history’, and its society has suddenly ‘bristled’ – aside from ‘parts … unstoried yet’ – with ‘cases of “things seen” and felt’ (Aut, pp. 489–90). It is the American nation, the ‘body social itself ’ which possesses and assimilates this influx, but James’s body too absorbs this ‘discharge’ (a term used twice, with typically late-Jamesian archness), in its physical force; his senses are ‘brushed’, and he, like others, is ‘pushed forward’, all finding themselves ‘more pushable yet’. The ‘lift’ and ‘push’ of this ‘immensely remonté state’ are the figures to which, he confesses, he must ‘resort’ (Aut, p. 490). In these images of welcome physical manhandling he characterizes the new freedoms of the post-war nation. There was a future, James hints, in this entirely localized view of a changed America, but in reality he had quickly turned to Europe and his reminiscences remain, insofar as he celebrates the soldier, with the beloved young men who had already lost the chance of a future. Releasing them from history, he ‘stories’ most fully those who were killed in a series of sketches related to the ‘partial portraits’ familiar from his critical writing. They remain young men whose mystery and otherness are wondered at even fifty years later. James had sensed in his young cousin, Gus Barker, from Albany, ‘a certain sort of richer consciousness’. In childhood James had envied ‘the lot’ of others, but, owing to ‘a lack of spirit’, as he self-deprecatingly confesses, felt little jealousy. Gus was 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’ (Aut, p. 101). This ‘little red-headed kinsman’ (Aut, p. 99) was one of those orphaned cousins regarded by James as ‘somehow more thrilling than parentally provided ones’ (Aut, p. 10). Having come from Albany to school in New York, Gus already belongs to a different, mysterious world: ‘though he professed a complete satisfaction with pleasures tasted in our innocent society I felt that he was engaged in a brave and strenuous adventure while we but hugged the comparatively safe shore’ (Aut, p. 11). These are the familiar polarities of James’s sense of self and his passively gazing at a desirable other, with no compulsion to cross a dividing

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line. His remembered schoolroom is a shamingly feminine place: he confesses the ‘degrading fact’ that ‘with us literally consorted and contended Girls’, and his teachers too were women whose names he still recalls. ‘“Gussy”’ already belongs to a contrasting and recognizably masculine world of which he possesses superior knowledge and experience, giving his appearances an ‘ironic effect’: thus with ‘his emergence from rich mystery and his return to it, our state was but comparatively the braver: he always had so much more to tell us than we could possibly have to tell him’. Arriving from school just around the corner, he appeared ‘as floated by exotic airs and with the scent of the spice-islands hanging about him’ (Aut, pp. 14, 107). Even his premature death accomplishes what is characterized as a consistent life: ‘as by a sharp prevision’, he ‘snatched what gaiety he might from a life to be cut short, in a cavalry dash, by one of the Confederate bullets of 1863’.11 Attending a ‘military school’, his appearance – he is ‘clad in a fashion that represented to me the very panoply of war’ – equipped with the necessary and desired military insignia, confirms his heroic, masculine role. He takes some of the family on a ‘gregarious’ trip to tour (in the custom of the times) Sing-Sing penitentiary in New York, and is recalled as shining ‘with a rare radiance’ in James’s narrative: Ingenuous and responsive, of a social disposition, a candour of gaiety, that matched his physical activity – the most beautifully made athletic little person, and in the highest degree appealing and engaging – he not only did us the honours of his dazzling academy (dazzling at least to me) but had all the air of showing us over the great State prison which even then flourished near at hand and to which he accompanied us …

Gus’s ‘dazzling’ presence persuades James (in comic hindsight) that ‘State prisons were on the whole delightful places, vast, bright and breezy’ and that the felons held there were guilty only of ‘gentlemanly crimes’ (Aut, pp. 99– 100).12 When Gus Barker posed as a life model in the Newport studio of William Morris Hunt where both John La Farge and William and (to a lesser extent) Henry James were studying art, the students were ‘inspired to splendid performance by the beautiful young manly form of our cousin, Gus Barker … perched on a pedestal and divested of every garment … the gayest as well as the neatest of models’. In the conventionality and decorum of the all-male studio he is permitted, indeed required, to look upon this ‘beautiful’, ‘manly’ body, but the moment challenged him and confirmed that, with few of his brother’s drawing skills, he must give up art, as he ruefully recalls: ‘since our genial kinsman’s perfect gymnastic figure meant living truth, I should certainly best testify to the whole mystery by pocketing my pencil’ (Aut, p. 293). Whatever the erotic con-

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tent of the experience, it is, seemingly, the perfection of the revealed male body which forces upon him such a recognition. This late recollection allows James to portray Gus at least in the medium of words. He kept ‘William’s finished rendering of the happy figure’ for the rest of his life, thus possessing him and translating a technical drawing exercise into a different kind of object. Gus’s final public gesture of joining the Union army continues to affirm, in James’s eyes, his admired masculinity: he has thrown himself ‘into the fray, that is into the cavalry saddle, as he might into a match at baseball’. His last sight of this kinsman remains silent and regretted. Seeing Gus bidding farewell to some classmates across Harvard Square, the student James himself ‘missed speech of him’. The elderly James is left with his ‘present vision’ of Gus, ‘his bright-coloured wagging head … the large gaiety of the young smile that made his handsome teeth shine out’ (Aut, p. 307). While the ‘public complication’, ‘the great intersectional plot’ of the Civil War is contained, in James’s review of national history, by the body of the young American soldier, he embraces both the North and the South in his sympathies. The temporary New York neighbours of the Jameses in the early fifties, the Norcom family from Kentucky, represent in their hospitality (molasses, hot cakes, sausages) ‘Southern grace’, though they also possess for a time two slaves, or ‘affectionate black retainers’. Albert Norcom, as James’s contemporary, was his ‘chosen friend’, but it is his older brother, Eugene, presumably killed fighting with some Confederate unit, who is recollected in more romantic detail. In sketching Eugene’s future growth and premature death, James invokes his own old age as a condition in which such fond speculation may justifiably be indulged. The family had suddenly left New York, perhaps as a consequence of the growing abolitionist movement, and ‘in the light of later things’ when ‘memory and fancy attended them’, he had ‘figured their history’. But Eugene, like Gus Barker, divided from James by age, especially ‘haunted’ his imagination in some scene of destruction: ‘The slim, the sallow, the straight-haired and dark-eyed Eugene … had not been my comrade of election – he was too much my senior; but I cherished the thought of the fine fearless young fire-eater he would have become and, when the War had broken out, I know not what dark but pitying vision of him stretched stark after a battle’ (Aut, pp. 142–4). James’s information on the young man who receives the most extensive treatment in A Small Boy and Others is more definite and sustained. His cousin Vernon King succumbed, ‘as I figure still incorrigibly smiling’, in ‘the great carnage roundabout Richmond’ (Aut, p. 222), but the lead-up to his death, the conflict with his mother, Charlotte, whose anti-abolitionist sympathies disapproved of his Northern allegiance, her uncompromising exercise of will in scenes set in France, Newport and Cambridge, suggest events of a weight unimagined in his own short fictions related to the Civil War. Char-

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lotte King, after years spent in the Far East, as well as Gramercy Park, finally reaches, under James’s ‘eye’, the crisis of the Civil War, in which Vernon, unforgiven by her stiff conservatism for his Northern loyalty, laid down before Petersburg a young life of understanding and pain, uncommemorated as to the gallantry of his end – he had insistently returned to the front, after a recovery from first wounds, as under his mother’s malediction – on the stone beneath which he lies in the old burial ground at Newport, the cradle of his father’s family.

In this elliptical summary of filial disobedience and adherence to a higher cause, heroic death followed by an unforgiving mourning, James is righting a wrong and shaping the nuances of family history. Responding to the idea of narrative, he moves the reader ‘to the very end of the story’, far distant from the days of the war, and offers the impression, first, of a little lonely, soft-voiced, gentle, relentless lady, in a dull Surrey garden of a summer afternoon, more than half blind and all dependent on the dame de compagnie who read aloud to her that Saturday Review which had ever been the prop and mirror of her opinions and to which she remained faithful, her children estranged and outworn, dead and ignored; and the vision, second and for a climax, of an old-world rez-de-chaussée at Versailles, goal of my final pilgrimage, almost in presence of the end … (Aut, p. 156).13

In his omniscience James can assign Mrs King’s genteel futility and deathly isolation to a continuing relentlessness (her choice of reading betrays the most conservative orthodoxy),14 whilst, by contrast, Vernon is tenderly remembered. From kindly motives and ‘for reasons independent of its quality’ the novelist quotes a few lines from ‘some very youthful poem’ by Vernon in which a protagonist from some quasi-Tennysonian narrative exclaims how ‘while we talked the mighty past / Around us lived and breathed again’, in striking contrast to James’s own voice and manner of reviving the past. Vernon, recalled as more travelled and Europeanized than James himself, impresses the younger man as he studies for his baccalaureate in Paris. He had visited the James family in the Paris of the Second Empire, entering (in a familiar trope) a scene from fairy-tale, coming ‘at scraps of moments’ ‘as to quite a make-believe and ginger-bread place, the lightest of substitutes for the “Europe” in which he had been from the first so technically plunged’. Though, like other males of James’s late fiction, Vernon has come briefly to inhabit (at least to a fanciful observer) some fairy-tale place, the novelist seems more intent on redressing injustice, on revising the silence of the blank Newport tombstone, the only memorial offered by his mother on a valiant death. Regarded as ‘too long pressed and impressed, too long prescribed to … and all under too firmer a will’ (Aut, pp. 219–21), Vernon is released into the present, and almost, as James’s portrait remarks, allowed to breathe again. Of

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that Paris period15 when Vernon was ‘dipped … in the deep, the refining waters’ to be experienced by the two oldest James brothers too, the novelist exclaims of the process, parenthetically, ‘I get it all back!’, as if in those rooms with his stenographer, Theodora Bosanquet, his ‘“little Chelsea temple with its Egeria”’ (Life, vol. II, p. 731), the beloved Vernon has been retrieved within a continuum which unites present and past. The young man, ‘the most interesting surely in all the troop of our young kinsmen early baffled and gathered’, becomes part of the present, denoted by the shift in verb tense as Vernon’s close physical presence makes its unspoken but eloquent appeal. Remembered impressions serve so to ‘enhance one’s tenderness for Vernon’s own image … that he glances at me out of the Paris period, fresh-coloured, just blond-bearded, always smiling and catching his breath a little as from a mixture of eagerness and shyness, with such an appeal to the right idealisation, or to belated justice, as makes of mere evocation a sort of exercise of loyalty’ (Aut, pp. 219–20). Though the James family had lived in Paris, Vernon has been more deeply immersed and, like Gus Barker, he appears to the recollecting James in a radiant light: ‘he shone, to my fancy, and all the more for its seeming so brightly and quietly in his very grain, with the vague, the supposititious, but the intensely accent-giving stamp of the Latin quarter’. The sense of a richer, freer and less anxiously troubled acceptance of the self than one could imagine for any of the James children (despite the seeming congeniality of their parents) remains when Vernon is once more encountered back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, three or four years later. His remembered face, lovingly itemized, continues to draw James’s fascinated attention: he sees him still always with the smile that was essentially as facial, as livingly and loosely fixed, somehow, as his fresh complexion itself; always too with the air of caring so little for what he had been put through that, under any appeal to give out, more or less wonderfully, some sample or echo of it, as who should say, he still mostly panted as from a laughing mental embarrassment: he had been put through too much; it was all stale to him, and he wouldn’t have known where to begin (Aut, p. 220).

What Vernon has been ‘put through’ must relate to his unrelenting mother; his unstudied dismissal of the question and charming breathlessness, related in James’s ever-attentive prose, simply confirms a kind of remembered perfection. On his volunteering for army service with the outbreak of war, Vernon assumes in James’s eyes a final eroticized heroism. His dropping of privilege (‘the tongues, the degrees, the diplomas, the reminiscences’ (Aut, p. 221)) on joining up ‘simply as the American soldier … the common enlisting native’, charms James as much as the characteristic physical response: ‘he smiled and gasped’ ‘to the increase of his happy shortness of breath’. Now, returned once more to the past and assigned a tragic place in American history, Vernon’s life is felt as exemplary

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in both its private and public working. In enlisting and countering a dubious maternal influence James recalls him as ‘at once so despoiled, so diverted, and above all so resistantly bright, as vaguely to suggest something more in him still, some deep-down reaction, some extremity of indifference and defiance’. The national crisis of war during which he served under McClellan and Grant has provided the circumstances for a personal apotheosis of tragic consequence in sifting and testing the ‘young character’: ‘the public pretext had given him a lift, or lent him wings, which without its greatness might have failed him’ (Aut, p. 220). This unusually extended portrait compensates for the silence of ‘the bare head-stone on the Newport hillside’ where ‘figured no hint of the manner of his death’ which James must have visited either in 1904–5 or in 1910–11. The events following Vernon’s death are narrated as a sequence from Greek tragedy with a further relegation of the female members of the family. His body is reclaimed by his sister Anne (a ‘low-toned … little Brontë heroine’ in appearance) who is ‘not less firm than the others of her blood’: the ‘most colourless Electra of a lucidest Orestes, making her difficult way amid massed armies and battle-drenched fields, got possession of his body and bore it for reinterment to Newport’ (Aut, p. 222). James refrains from developing this classical parallel by conferring the role of the monstrous figure of Clytemnestra on Mrs King. Having fulfilled her duty, Anne King would return to Europe on ‘some black and tub-like Cunarder’, there to die prematurely. The young soldiers of the Civil War, silent in their anonymity, and, even when individualized, lacking even the eloquence of a funeral epitaph, conduct James into his own youth. In these recollections he can speak, in such admiration that he confesses to being occasionally lost for words, with the freedom of the old man – rather as the dying Mr Betterman admires Gray Fielder in The Ivory Tower.16 Yet these young men – in having died – are even more vulnerable than the ill and convalescent protagonists who people his fiction and who seem to him ‘beautiful’. In contrast with the circumstances detailed in his early tales, the Civil War is now recast and reimagined in exclusively male terms, contained in bodies which are bright and illuminated, and returned to his consciousness by his own return to America and the confrontation with its possibilities as a nation.

8 LIFE-WRITING FOR THE MAN OF LETTERS

Part One I have discussed a single strand of the autobiographical output of James’s later years in the male figures whom he celebrates before they are absorbed by history. These portraits have a directness of execution, a detachability, which relate to James’s eulogistic purpose; they are uniformly well-lit, as if emphasizing the physicality of these young men. Even before they died they held mystery for James because they embodied ‘otherness’, romantically desired and never to be attained. They are men whom James can talk about most fully in the privileged condition of old age. Yet such definition and assertiveness are not typical of these autobiographical volumes; indeed, in confronting both his own youth and America, his strategies tend to indirectness. This can only be unsurprising in the memoirs of a man of letters: his texts continually stress that final, professional destination as they consider his formative years, and it was his handling of a cache of letters, those belonging to his recently dead brother, which led James, rather than simply editing them, to lay down his own version of that shared past. Using letters as a loose gathering point – simply as documents or as a term for the pursuit of literature (though reflecting something of James’s own wilful applying and handling of terms, literal and figurative) and as a means of formalizing a central theme in his life, I now want to consider the construction of the man of letters as he represents that formation. Recollection of his early years returns him to America, as indeed do the physical documents he leafs through, though, however introspective the process, it is evident that in writing autobiography he also confers roles and engages in strategies of devolvement, circumventing the subjective in a series of manoeuvres which even exploit the scenic forms of theatre and the novel. If America had shocked him in its twentieth-century form, he had striven to accommodate it. He can now control his own progress (pushing, to recall a favourite trope, as gently as required on some half-open door) into his own American past, though, having gained access, he will find it a ‘queer’ place, oddly as incomprehensible as the present. – 111 –

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The conclusion of A Small Boy and Others exemplifies in its attentiveness to sensation, its inconclusiveness and exploitation of uncertainty, James’s more characteristic autobiographical mode: the narrative is suspended as the young Henry James, ‘betraying strange pains and apprehensions’,1 and then confined to his bed with illness, ‘the malignant typhus of old days’ (Aut, pp. 236, 224), attempts to cross the room to pull the bell for attention: ‘The question of whether I really reached and rang it was to remain lost afterwards in the strong sick whirl of everything about me’. His ‘lapse of consciousness’ will be treated, as he tells us, ‘as a considerable gap’, his voice only to be heard again at the opening of the sequel volume, Notes of a Son and Brother. The worsening bout of illness will act as the reader’s intermission, controlled by that event of long ago, a living and innovative mimetic moment coinciding with the writer’s unconsciousness, just as James’s discourse suggests. The setting is France and, acknowledging autobiography’s obligation to referentiality, or at least the circumstantial, James has detailed ‘the mild animation of the Boulogne street through the half-open windows’, as well as his tutor, M. Ansiot, who ‘smelt of the vieux temps’ in this Rue des Vieillards.2 Now in old age, James can both mystify his reader by partial disclosure and evaluate the long-term significance of an episode, registering ‘the strange sense that something had begun that would make more difference to me, directly and indirectly, than anything had ever yet made’. He feigns to guess that the small boy might, at that moment, have had an insight: ‘I might verily, on the spot, have seen, as in a fading of day and a change to something suddenly queer, the whole large extent of it’ (Aut, pp. 235–6). In this moment of uncertainty James is ‘On the Eve’ (to borrow a term from his favourite Russian, Turgenev), not of revolution but of a greater maturity – ‘the marked limit of my state of being a small boy’ (Aut, p. 224). The narrative falls inconclusively silent at the end of the volume as the reader learns that James has reached the point where his volume’s title has ceased to apply. In thus signalling ‘turning points’, ‘“life stages”’ or ‘cultural rites de passage’ – the landmarks which, we are told,3 emerge in any recounting of life history, oral or written, James reverts to more conventional means: having inhabited again the mystery of the experience, even mimicking the ongoing uncertainty of time, he can designate it as a concluding point. After suggesting that the stay in the Pas-de-Calais is associated with ‘the gravest illness of my life’, and that it constitutes ‘a stretch in the direction of essential change or of living straight into a part of myself quite unvisited and now made accessible as by the sharp forcing of a closed door’, James concludes the volume with the drama of the child’s entry into that ‘unvisited’ part of himself which will constitute the continuing ‘self ’ of Notes of a Son and Brother. The period of stay in Boulogne-sur-Mer which might have provided a ‘vast little subject’ is cut short by this illness so that he views the world ‘well-nigh after the fashion of some mild domestic but quite considerably

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spreading grease-spot’, though it had its ‘relenting edges’ and ‘fainter thicknesses’ which allowed him to see something of his ‘picture’. Such a composition, he confesses, is what he was ‘always so incurably “after”’ which would otherwise have lacked ‘animation’, failing ‘to bristle with characteristics, with figures and objects and scenic facts … the stuff, in short, of … our multiplied memories’ (Aut, pp. 223–5). The sick bed in which James spends the final pages of his first volume can be regarded as a location, par excellence, for his vocation of gathering ‘impressions’ and observing, his passivity decreed and formalized by the condition of illness. It marks too the gateway to that ‘unvisited’ part of himself, as if illness itself carries some enhancing insignia, a connection which has a broad currency in the fiction, especially in the lives of young men and their relations with each other. A state of reflective observation (in contrast with the temperament of his older brother who liked to ‘brush away old moral scraps in favour of new rather than to hoard and so complacently exhibit them’ (Aut, p. 41) – a divergence reflected in their distinctive prose styles) was noticed, James imagines, by his parents. Knowing of his ‘flâneries’ through New York’s ‘beguiling streets’ from an early age, his parents must have judged him immune from danger, believing that ‘the only form of riot or revel ever known to me would be that of the visiting mind’ (Aut, p. 16). James selects this activity of strolling and observing (in the adult involving, too, a state of disguise or at least remaining indistinguishable within a crowd), whilst acknowledging the dangers of the street, to be an emblem of his future development, formally noting this moment of vocation, loading it with the terms and activities that will characterize his observing self through life. In the role of flâneur, with its opportunities for disguise and anonymity, he will go on in both the fiction and extended topographical writings to reveal the cities of Europe and America. Now in old age, he projects himself backwards in a series of affirmations: ‘I … watch the small boy dawdle and gape again, I smell the cold dusty paint and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his contemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no grain of my sympathy’. The humble, make-do sensibility he detects will determine his life: his demand ‘just to be somewhere – almost anywhere would do – and somehow receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration’. He will, as he confides, spend a life following this ‘far from showy practice of wondering and dawdling and gaping’ which would indeed be his profitable ‘education’ (Aut, pp. 16–17). Though James emphasizes how distinct he is from his older brother, this felt engagement with, and commitment to, an earlier self is sympathetically theorized in William James’s treatment of the ‘consciousness of self ’ when he asks whether it is true that ‘I am the same self that I was yesterday’. In our liking for continuity we retrieve the comfortable familiarity of those sensations or thoughts associ-

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ated with some previous experience – ‘them we shall imagine with the animal warmth upon them, to them may possibly cling the aroma, the echo of the thinking taken in the act’.4 These, according to William James, are the distinguishing properties of our own consciousness: We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they us?5

Apart from the significantly different style of William James’s treatise, his ‘mighty and magnificent book’, as James referred to it (JF, p. 334), the heteronormativity of his allusions as father figure and aggressive (masculine) protector of his young makes a striking contrast to Henry James’s field of invoked experience or implied gender performance. Indeed William’s terms anticipate his brother’s most closely in the references to the ‘warmth’ and ‘aroma’ of our retrieval of remembered events: for Henry James these tropes are most closely associated with his repossession of the lost young soldiers of the Civil War. According to William James we are a ‘stream of selves’ stretching back from our ‘self of the present moment’, however continuous memory makes our acquisition and retention of experience appear. Indeed, continuity ‘gives its own kind of unity to the self – that of mere connectedness, or unbrokenness, a perfectly definite phenomenal thing’.6 The opening of Notes of a Son and Brother moves on from that unresolved ending of the previous volume as the remembered boy staggers across the room for the bell. The Middle Years, the next sequence of autobiography, also re-examines a concluding proposition from its preceding volume. He there nominates the premature death of his cousin Mary Temple as the end of youth, a further marked stage which he goes on to interrogate: ‘We are never old, that is we never cease easily to be young; for all life at the same time’, as if youth is what we lose, despite ourselves. Experience is more fluid in its acquisition, and to illustrate its more blurred definition James offers two ‘figures’. The first involves a journey into hostile terrain and in its purposefulness might remind us of the masculineaggressive cast of William James’s terms: ‘youth is an army, the whole battalion of our faculties and freshnesses, our passions and our illusions, on a considerably reluctant march into the enemy’s country, the country of the general lost freshness’. The growing darkness of age is redeemed by the few ‘stragglers’, some of whom never catch up with the army’s ‘main body’ (Aut, p. 547), thus serving as reminders of how it feels to be young. Something of the revived feelings surrounding Minny’s death testify to the strength of such stragglers. James’s second trope which involves the familiar idea of acquired experience as the Book of Life introduces a further measure of incompletion and amendment, in keeping with the temperament which undertook the major revisions of

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the New York Edition. A life seems to demand several constituent volumes for its Book, with homely, humorous reminders of places to be marked and a selfreferential kind of bookishness: ‘it is a book in several volumes, and even at this a mere instalment of the large library of life, with a volume here and there closing, as something in the clap of its covers may assure us, while another remains either completely agape or kept open by a fond finger thrust in between the leaves’. The death of Minny Temple in 1870 nevertheless marks a decisive and unarguable conclusion in this imagined library scene: ‘A volume, and a most substantial, had felt its pages very gravely pressed together before the winter’s end that I have spoken of ’ (Aut, p. 547). The constitution of ‘self ’ will continue as an object of study in psychology through the twentieth century, problematized by a belief in Essentialism, an essence pre-existing ‘our effort to describe it’, or understood as ‘an enduring, subjective nucleus’, or ‘better conceived as “distributed”’.7 Indeed, according to some representatives of neuroscience, the idea of self may well be an illusion. There are dangers, in any case, in reading Jamesian autobiography in a referential way at the simplest, most expository level which might assume a verifiable level of accuracy. Given the proof that a number of the letters included in Notes of a Son and Brother have been heavily edited and revised by James there is no reason why all the material used should not have been subject to a similar process.8 The extent to which this is misleading about the ‘truth’ – the people who wrote the letters, their motives in writing, the situations upon which they reflected at a specific moment – is now impossible to calculate. In effect they have had to be sacrificed to the predatory-manipulative power (at worst) of the great artist who supersedes them. Discrepancies – where the evidence becomes available – can only inform us about the artist as he felt in that process at that time. Even then, when ‘facts’ are examined or found not to be robust (as, for instance, when James conflates the family’s two stays in Newport – perhaps to shield his father from any accusation of indecision) the disclosure can now only serve to allow speculation on the feelings of an ageing artist and sibling attached to a distinguished family. What Jerome Bruner argues for all of us and our capacity or need to tell stories offers a generous model for our reading, not only of what James recognized as autobiography – but for approaching the complexities of The American Scene and even the later fiction. If we continually rewrite and revise our own pasts (as James did in the format of the New York Edition9) we write not only ourselves but our relation to ‘other’ and our role in relation to culture, even as we are defined by that culture. So the ‘truth’ is adjustable and revisable, reflecting only on the recording self and its attitude to the past. For Bruner, ‘it is through narrative that we create and re-create selfhood … self is a product of our telling and not some essence to be delved for in the recesses of

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subjectivity … The construction of selfhood, it seems, cannot proceed without a capacity to narrate.’10 In the context of formal autobiography – itself a medium which raises problems of genre11 – the self is a construction within a contrived medium, indeed becomes highly influential in its own self-promotion: it is, as Paul John Eakin suggests, an author’s instinctively readerly knowledge of the effect of autobiographical narrative that would lead him or her to exploit its potential for reference to endow that principal referent, the self, with a reality it might not otherwise enjoy. That is to say, if the premise of autobiographical referentiality that we can move from knowledge of the text to knowledge of the self proves to be a fiction, the text becomes paradoxically not less precious but more: in making the text the autobiographer constructs a self that would not otherwise exist.12

If this emergent self composed through the writing of autobiography (laying aside the impossible question of ‘truth’ or even facticity) verges on being a fictional construction, the distinction between autobiography and the autobiographical novel is unclear, unless one invokes Philippe Lejeune’s ‘pacte autobiographique’, by which the autobiographer ‘commits himself or herself not to some impossible historical exactitude but rather to the sincere effort to come to terms with and to understand his or her own life’.13 Whatever the ambiguous dangers of ‘sincerity of effort’ in reaching some coherent representation of self, the narrative exercise of ‘self-making’ can usefully be regarded, as Bruner suggests, as keeping two things, the past and the possible, together, ‘in an endless dialectic: “how my life has always been and should rightly remain” and “how things might have been or might still be”’.14 It is highly significant that James embarked on this ‘self-making’ exercise only after the death of William in 1910. It is well known that the original intention was to produce a ‘Family Book’ interweaving his own text with his brother’s letters – the documents James regards as William’s ‘real and best biography’.15 In the event, the exercise outgrew this plan. A Small Boy and Others contains no letters, dealing with James’s early childhood. Notes of a Son and Brother reproduces a fair selection of family letters and concludes with a large number of extracts from Minny Temple’s correspondence. Harry, William’s son, published a two-volume edition of his letters in 1920, after his uncle’s death, but he had been unhappy about his uncle’s revisions of his father’s letters, an unhappiness that James later recognized and sympathized with.16 His justification, he eloquently argues, lies in his imagining William James’s feelings about publishing to the world ‘those rough and rather illiterate copies’, and, in ‘a passion of tenderness’, ‘doing the best by him’. It is as if William had briefly replaced James’s familiar ‘genius’ or muse, recorded in the notebooks as ‘mon bon’, who remains consolingly at his side as an

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intimate and loving presence: ‘I seemed to feel him in the room and at my elbow … as I worked and as he listened’ (JF, p. 108). Yet even in the planning stage, there is an ambiguity of purpose, or of emphasis. He asks that his nephew be told 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 & perilous – but if I bring it off it will be exquisite & unique; bring it off as I inwardly project it & oh so devoutly desire it.17

The project is little less than an act of devotion, even allowing for James’s heightened manner, yet it is also unarguably his story, his laying of claim to, or ‘encompassment’, of this past, an autobiography as both a brother and a son, the prospective material to be processed and ‘brought off ’ as a writing experiment ‘inwardly’ projected. It seems strange that F. O. Matthiessen in his masterly synthesis of The James Family should, after a paragraph when he has discussed Alice James and her mother, refer to James’s work as ‘one of the least self-centered autobiographies on record’ (JF, p. 72), when neither of these influential women receives much attention.18 The text is never vain or self-aggrandizing, but – whatever its gender bias – it is clear that the strategies of narration used, with their diversionary and dramatic inventiveness, return inevitably and unfailingly to a writing of the self and its changing elements. There is evidence all through his life that James’s physical and mental state was influenced by the events and conditions of William’s life, and Matthiessen refers to the complementary dynamics of their relationship, the ‘active and passive, participating and detached, scientific and aesthetic’ features of their temperaments (JF, p. v). Thus William’s death, with James and Alice, his wife, in attendance, could well have freed the novelist, allowing him to possess those letters which would return him to the past and initiate the autobiographical act as the last surviving member of a generation. As he watches his brother dying, he notes the ironic disparity of their roles: ‘my slowly recuperative process goes on despite all checks and shocks, while dear William’s, in the full climax of his intrinsic powers and intellectual ambitions, meets this tragic, cruel arrest’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 560). Such a cause certainly accords with Jean Starobinski’s belief that ‘one would hardly have sufficient motive to write an autobiography had not some radical change occurred in his life – conversion, entry into a new life, the operation of Grace’.19 Yet despite some recollections which now testify to a more liberated perspective and a discourse which can seem to invite a complicity with the reader,20 James undertakes the autobiographical burden with some diffidence, even assuming a

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passivity which diminishes responsibility. In the earliest pages of A Small Boy and Others he may well be deferring to the ‘ideal Elder Brother’, his immediate posthumous characterization of William with those revealing capitals (HJL, vol. IV, p. 561). His claims on the past at the beginning of that volume are formulated as questions rather than assertions in an ‘interrogation of the past’. Becoming a modest supplicant he will ‘knock at the door of the past’, though access is surprisingly simple; it stands open and revealing, and all he need do, seemingly, in this reduction of authorial responsibility, is to watch ‘the world within begin to “compose” with a grace of its own round the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently’ (Aut, pp. 3–4). The ‘primary figure’ is his brother, who, in contrast with James’s introspection, might well have professed ‘impatience’ at his brother’s ‘reach of reminiscence’, embracing the new and dismissing the valued activity of retrospection. James, it seems, acquired caution in disclosing such preserved material, as if its retrieval had involved shame: ‘the ragbag of memory hung on its nail in my closet, though I learnt with time to control the habit of bringing it forth’. This is the reactive behaviour of his earlier years predicated upon William’s example, or, indeed, his scorn. Now it may be ‘brought forth’: ‘I say that with a due sense of my doubtless now appearing to empty it into these pages’ (Aut, p. 41). He feels safe, on William’s death, to dispose of this material, though his terms suggest a kind of expulsion of leftovers or waste matter, promiscuously heaped up in the form of autobiography. Indeed, he wrote to his nephew, at the end of the project, that he has been ‘working off ’ ‘the heritage of woe of the last three years’.21 If it was William James’s imagined presence urging James to make him presentable to the living world, other less immediate ghosts make their appeal in the most unchallenging, humble way, as he practises what he calls his ‘apparitionism’. Such ghosts can, it seems, be cast as pursuers or pursued, aggressive or abject – that duality is evident in the celebrated nightmare of the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon, as well as in the nocturnal events of ‘The Jolly Corner’.22 They may even be cast as a presence representing some remembered place; in any event, they constitute the initial premise of recollection, appealing in a touching access of self-consciousness to someone still involved with the business of the continuing world: To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the less lost – not to my consciousness … but to its own – by my stopping however idly for it (Aut, p. 54).

The remote family ‘ghosts’ belonging to the ‘“old New York”’ of the antebellum period, characterized by the ‘bonhomie’ of the ‘manners of the time’, though figuratively recalled in the medium of the supernatural and the winding cloths of

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the dead, offer a gentle reassurance, benignly reflecting on mortality within the ongoing generations of family: ‘For it was of an altogether special shade and sort that the New York young naturalness of our prime was touchingly to linger with us – so that to myself, at present, with only the gentle ghosts of the so numerous exemplars of it before me, it becomes the very stuff of the soft cerements in which their general mild mortality is laid away’ (Aut, p. 27–8). They lie in rest, inhabitants of the once ‘bucolic’ city which, in its twentieth-century formation, James has attempted to capture in The American Scene. In that text, a hapless ‘man of letters’ is rendered obsolete, a kind of St George fighting the dragon, whilst a new world of letters, composed of a language evolving and eclectic, absorbing the variant dialects of the new Americans processed through Ellis Island, is taking over. James there signalled the retrogressive dangers of the calling, but the autobiography offers an expanded reading of letters – the documents narrating family history and letters as literature, the fiction of the mid-Victorian giants who laid down a network of reference for the experiences and observations of the ‘small boy’. A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother constitute the history of someone who lived by his ‘impressions’ ( James’s modest characterization of a career in letters), and their avowedly anecdotal content, the named sources of memory, the re-envisaging of distant childhood scenes, the meetings with eminent men, the theatricality of scenes and their potential for being ‘made’, the physical primacy of letters in allowing the enterprise, point to varieties of literariness which act as both an interpretive and enabling influence. James’s initiation, not into the specifically literary, but the aesthetic, a premonition of ‘all the fun, confusedly speaking, that one was going to have’,23 occurs appropriately in the ornate rooms of the Louvre at the age of twelve, and the family’s first arrival in Paris. Exposed to some celebrated French romantic paintings, he foresees ‘the kind of life, always of the queer so-called inward sort, tremendously “sporting” in its way’ that the autobiography will catalogue. The moment of revelation is enhanced by the presence of the family’s ‘blackwhiskered’ Italian courier, Jean Nadali, to whom the boy ‘clings’, excited by his masculine presence: ‘I hang again, appalled but uplifted, on brave Nadali’s arm – his professional acquaintance with the splendours about us added for me on the spot to the charm of his “European” character’ (Aut, p. 198): the apprehension was ‘almost awful’: ‘there was alarm in it somehow as well as bliss’. In James’s portrait of himself so long ago it seems that he defines the future for the ‘small boy’: in a happy state of subjection to a man empowered by knowledge and whiskers,24 he will find his own version of assertiveness in a ‘sport’, ‘queer’ and introspective, which will pursue aesthetic experience. Earlier experience is recalled from childhood as evidence of a developing imagination. James was first exposed to what he calls ‘the force of the Dickens imprint’ (Aut, p. 68) in the most public, theatrical context, in ‘arrangements of

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Dickens for the stage’, little more than ‘the roughest theatrical tinkers’ work’ (Aut, p. 65), performed on Fifth Avenue, which he recalls with a ‘sharp retention’, evidence of ‘the immense authority of the theatre’, a conviction related to his quest for success in drama in his middle years. In the domestic scenes of his childhood he is exposed to the novels as well as participating in scenes which he now reads as themselves Dickensian. He offers ‘a single small reminiscence’ of being sent to bed ‘as a very small boy’ whilst an elder cousin, ‘the youngest of an orphaned brood of four’ reads aloud to his mother – a situation which re-enacts the pathos of some episode from Dickens. She is reading ‘the new, which must have been the first, instalment of David Copperfield’, as James conceals himself: ‘glued to the carpet, I held my breath and listened’: ‘I listened long and drank deep while the wondrous picture grew, but the tense cord at last snapped under the strain of the Murdstones and I broke into the sobs of sympathy that disclosed my subterfuge’ (Aut, pp. 68–9). Betrayed by the feelings aroused by the fictive autobiography, he is rudely propelled into his own domestic scene of pathos of which he has been an undetected observer. Cruikshank’s illustrations for Dickens, the ‘vividly terrible images’, which had the ‘peculiarity’ of making even ‘the scenes and figures intended to comfort and cheer’ ‘more subtly sinister, or more suggestively queer, than the frank badnesses and horrors’ (Aut, p. 69),25 peopled the boy’s imagination even more powerfully than the narratives. When James revives minor characters from his distant childhood he writes them as Dickensian caricatures. The little servant-girl who brought the pupils stale cake at the London school James attended might have been ‘a Dickens foundling or “orfling”’ (Aut, p. 172), whilst the writing master from one of his New York schools, Mr Dolmidge, in his swallow-tailed coat, ‘a pure pen-holder of a man, melancholy and mild’, is transformed into ‘a picture of somebody in Dickens, a Phiz if not the Cruikshank pictures’, teaching scrolls and flourishes ‘in the form of surging seas and beaked and beady-eyed eagles’ (Aut, p. 117), the man and his calling grotesquely unified. In the process of recollection his own extended family become Dickensian protagonists, providing a ‘splendid subject’ for ‘the painter of character’. Individuals become curious eccentrics, products of a provincial American past. His Uncle Henry, full of ‘humility’, ‘intense amiability’ and ‘instinctive dignity’, is permitted to spend ‘but ten cents a day’, watched over by Aunt Helen; the situation belongs to David Copperfield as she represents ‘more or less another Miss Trotwood’ caring for Mr Dick, the ‘harmless lunatic’ (Aut, p. 84). After this childhood characterized by Dickensian grotesquerie and symbols, James’s adult meeting, in 1867, with the great novelist, ‘his exhibited idol of the mind’, is marked (perhaps inevitably) by silence, ‘an arrest in a doorway’, after which ‘nothing followed … or happened’. James recalls in his expression an inaccessibility, or unavailability, ‘a straight inscrutability,

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a merciless military eye’ which betokens ‘a kind of economy of apprehension’ (Aut, pp. 388–9). His first meeting with the other great mid-Victorian literary visitor to America, Thackeray, occurred in childhood and James relives comic anecdotal moments relating to his own buttoned waistcoat and to sister Alice’s crinoline dress.26 The autobiography goes on to invoke a Thackeray ‘world’ to which remembered individuals can be consigned, to suggest mild failure in life, thus reduced to a finely imagined but minor role in an unspecified narrative. Thackeray’s secretary, Eyre Crowe, had accompanied him on this fund-raising American trip of 1852, and is set to paint a portrait of Henry James, Senior. The work ‘fell below its general possibilities’, but James, unnoticed by the adults, recalls being ‘spellbound’ by the process. During his later ‘London years’ James noticed Crowe and recalls him as one of ‘the most touchingly resigned of the children of disappointment’, reducing him to a fictional medium and a place in one of his patron’s novels. In the mundane world of ‘fortune’ he has not prospered – a ‘sad’ conclusion, perhaps, and yet to James’s mind ‘impossible’ to read in this light. He is cast as a fictional triumph of imagination (whatever the actual unhappiness of his existence), of the kind that James so admired in Thackeray. As if Thackeray had imagined him, he becomes one of his successes ‘in the minor line, but with such a grace and such a truth, those of some dim second cousin to Colonel Newcome’ (Aut, p. 53). James returns to his childhood self in a comparable quasi-fictional location, watching the small boy of the 1850s, the ‘little gaping American’ with a ‘presumptuous vision’, walk down ‘the vast length’ of London’s Baker Street from St John’s Wood, ‘the Thackerayan vista of other days’: ‘I throbbed with the pride of a vastly enlarged acquaintance’ (Aut, p. 172). The James family’s stay in France extends even further into a network of Thackeray allusion. A female tutor in Paris, ‘our guide and philosopher’, reminds him of an illustration from Vanity Fair of Becky Sharp ‘lost in a cynical day-dream while her neglected pupils are locked in a scrimmage on the floor’ (Aut, p. 186).27 The time spent in Boulognesur-Mer (where he will fall ill) is recalled in scenes which James associates with The Newcomes. Boulogne and the Pas-de-Calais, that cross-channel refuge for the British who have encountered difficulties of a moral, social or financial kind at home, witness some late episodes of The Newcomes to which the family, ruled by Mrs Mackenzie (Clive Newcome’s poisonous mother-in-law, known as the Old Campaigner) escape from a humiliating bankruptcy. For James, the place – ‘I have known next to nothing of it since’, so rich in ‘local and social character’, comes ‘more than half-way … to meet the imagination open to such advances’. The ‘closely clustered and inviolate haute ville’ area of the old town, ‘the idle grey rampart, the moated and towered citadel, the tree-shaded bastion for strolling and sitting’, carries the history of a novel’s events: ‘Didn’t the Campaigner, suffering indigence at the misapplied hands of Colonel Newcome, rage at that

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hushed victim supremely and dreadfully just thereabouts – by which I mean in the haute ville – over some question of a sacrificed sweetbread or a cold hacked joint that somebody had been “at”’ (Aut, p. 225)? In this fondly remembered domestic detail, James is perhaps recalling Arthur Pendennis’s visit to the Newcome household where he is entertained by the Campaigner and notes that the Colonel ‘had been sent out to purchase a pâté from the pastrycook’s for my especial refection’.28 Such scenes have become ‘“immortalised” by Thackeray’, as James indicates with quotation marks which return the term to its source in popular journalism. The boy, in James’s recollections, leaves the ‘motley, sunny, breezy, bustling Port, with … its admirable fisher-folk of both sexes’ for the ‘old Thackerayan side’, ‘the scattered wealth of illustration of his sharpest satiric range’ which colour his impressions. He watches a scene ‘bristling’ with Thackeray’s creations, taken sometimes from the obscurer corners of such works as The Memoirs of Mr Charles J. Yellowplush (illustrated by Cruikshank) as well as from the major novels. They have become the types now ‘decayed’, and living on ‘nothink a year’29 which Thackeray both pitied and satirized. James watches ‘images from Men’s Wives, from the society of Mr. Deuceace and that of fifty other figures of the same creation, with Bareacres and Rawdon Crawleys and of course with Mrs. Macks, with Roseys of a more or less crumpled freshness and blighted bloom, with battered and bent, though doubtless never quite so fine, Colonel Newcomes not less’ (Aut, p. 229). As he looks back on these expatriate British figures from ‘our present levelling light’ (Aut, p. 270), they belong both to the historical and the fictional pasts, capably surviving in their shiftiness, as James punningly observes: they are a ‘shifting colony’ as far as they can ‘urgently or speculatively shift’, pursuing cunning strategies of selfpreservation. Excited by such variety of human potential James almost insinuates the scene into a Thackeray fiction. He scans the seedy, the subtly sinister, the vainly ‘genteel’, the generally damaged and desperate, and in particular perhaps the invincibly impudent … Such anointed and whiskered and eked-out, such brazen, bluffing, swaggering gentlemen, such floridly repaired ladies, their mates, all looking as hard as they could as if they were there for mere harmless amusement – it was as good, among them, as just being Arthur Pendennis to know so well, or at least to guess so fearfully, who and what they might be (Aut, pp. 229–30).

James had absorbed The Newcomes as it appeared, ‘yellow number by yellow number’ in a wintry Geneva, predating his stay in Boulogne, just as he had later read the ‘orange-covered’ journal edited by Thackeray, The Cornhill Magazine, which had spectacularly appeared in 1860. The memory remains, ‘the thrill of each composing item of that first number especially recoverable in its intensity’. The journal marks for James an unrepeatable mid-Victorian ‘sovereignty’

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of achievement in fiction, surpassing any comparably available ‘thrill possible to-day’, as James intones the names of Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and Trollope with all their ‘genial weight and force’. To James’s ‘charmed attention’ the Cornhill contained the voice and presence of the revered Thackeray himself as he appeared to ‘guarantee personally, intimately, with a present audibility that was as the accent of good company, the new relation with him’. He can even hear the ‘great Victorian clock’ distantly chiming and marking the ‘march of our age’, reminding its hearers they have ‘high company to keep’. This is the ‘golden age of letters’ and James will not enter such ‘vales of Arcady’ again (Aut, pp. 251–2). It is inevitable, then, that this latter-day man of letters, whose formative years coincided with the height of Dickens’s and Thackeray’s fame and the appearance of their works, should narrate much of his past self through a range of literary reference – the anecdotal recollection of great men of literature, the private excitements of reading the great works and journals, the theatricalization and public narration of their fiction, and, in this late revisiting of his childhood self, imagining or confirming those early scenes as themselves part of an enriching Victorian fiction. In reviving the colourful, eccentric or crowded moments of that childhood, James refers predominantly to those novels which emerged (sometimes serial part by part) in parallel with his own growth – as if the living and the reading have been integrated within the remembered experience. But it is clear from his opening preamble to A Small Boy and Others, which raises the themes of memory and the past, that, aside from that specific Victorian field of allusion, James’s identified role in returning to his immediate family, the ‘blest group of us’ (Aut, p. 4),30 and allowing its members to speak once again (for the time, at least), is a modified version of his task as a novelist – coaxing, compromising, retrieving, presenting – all part of a process of assembling a cohesive account of his childhood circumstances. His relationship to the events, indeed to the people, is proprietorial, though he asserts their freedom: as he says, with similar self-deprecation, of the ‘situation’ at the centre of The Wings of the Dove, ‘My business was to watch its turns as the fond parent watches a child perched, for its first riding-lesson, in the saddle’.31 He assigns the ‘blest’ individuals of his reminiscences a nominal independence since they belong, after its author’s ‘tolerably long life’, not only to his own youth but to a younger world – as if he had been born into a world itself ‘young with its own juvenility’, a kind of unfallen state, part of his ‘general Eden-like consciousness’ (Aut, p. 42). However compromised that autonomy may prove later in the text in his treatment of family letters, he is initially an arranger of the spectacle. He sees ‘a company of characters’, ‘a picture of differences’ to be retrieved in ‘each enacted and recovered moment’ ‘in the vivid image and the very scene’: ‘I cherish the moment and evoke the image and repaint the scene’ – actions which suggest the shaping vision, the need to ‘arrange’ (Aut, p. 4) and represent the spectacle, the aged

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autobiographer freshly emerged as a humble but highly influential member of the stage-crew in this emphatically theatrical arena. In what he admits to be a ‘cold-blooded’ attitude (though not to be compared with his dismissal of Eyre Crowe’s life) James progresses to a further scene of childhood set in his grandmother’s house, whose ‘charm’ lies in its ‘being so much and so sociably a nurseried and playroomed orphanage’. Six of his Temple cousins lost their young parents, and there were other instances of ‘the deepening and final darknesses’, ‘a chronicle of early deaths, arrested careers, broken promises, orphaned children’ (Aut, p. 10), tragic circumstances made familiar to us from the plots of mid-Victorian fiction. In retrieving ‘the old figures’, James portrays himself as a brocanteur, or a restorer of pictures, a reader and interpreter of that composite narrative, ‘told as with excellent art’ in ‘a rich and rounded picture’. He recalls his cousin, Albert, ‘still another of the blest orphans’ who represented for him the vaguest ‘possibilities’ and hinting at ‘a wild freedom’. He has succeeded in retrieving, in ‘puzzling out’, an adult version of that ‘old long story’ from whatever remains: ‘The frame was still there but a short time since, cracked and empty, broken and gaping’. The trope does not indicate whether the reference is to fellow survivors with memories, but what James may now access in this restoration process is the proportioned medium in which the network of figures from his childhood moved: he can do ‘justice to their truth of outline, their felicity of character and force of expression and function, above all to the compositional harmony in which they moved’ (Aut, p. 70). Memory has created a more finished ‘picture’, though James once more underplays his own influence: the composition ‘lives again to my considering eyes, and I admire as never before the fine artistry of fate’. The guardian of cousin Albert is his aunt Helen, noted for ‘her old-time value of clearness and straightness’, and with her moral gravity (and indeed certain limitations of imagination) she becomes an object for sustained aesthetic attention, like ‘some portrait by a grave Dutch or other truth-seeking master’ (Aut, p. 71). If in James’s configuration of memories she has assumed the still qualities of a seventeenth-century painting, other scenes are repossessed as sustained and proportioned moments of theatre: ‘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’ (Aut, p. 73). Aunt Helen’s husband, known as ‘Uncle’ with a ‘bald head … with the hair bristling up almost in short-horn fashion at the sides’, becomes, like his wife, a subject for portraiture, in James’s eyes ‘as complete a little old-world figure as any that might then have been noted there, far and wide’. He now realizes that he had ‘familiarly before’ him ‘a masterpiece of the great Daumier, say, or Henri Monnier’ (Aut, pp. 80–1). As on other occasions in the

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autobiography, James figuratively enters another scene across a threshold which dissolves distinctions between the real and symbolic, a moment in which ‘Uncle’ in a wonderfully mundane way, seeks information of the world: ‘I assist at his emergence, where the fine old mahogany doors of separation are rolled back on what used to seem to me silver wheels, into the brighter yet colder half of the scene, and attend him while he at last looks out awhile into Fourteenth Street for news of whatever may be remarkably, objectionably or mercifully taking place there’ (Aut, p. 80). Many of these figures from childhood mark a distinctively American heritage; great-aunt Wyckoff, ‘an image of living antiquity’, ‘solidly seated or even throned, hooded and draped and tucked-in’, ‘indicates her wants as divinities do’, surrounded by ‘pious ministrants’. Despite her predominantly European life, she is a surviving relic who had assumed the advantages of great age, in contrast with ‘our modern, our so generally greater and nobler effect of duration’ which clings to youth, a distinction which seems to please James. He amends ‘the past’ to ‘the Past’ in recalling the pleasure of finding it answer ‘to one’s own touch’, as if to register its weight; his great-aunt belongs to this body of history: ‘It was the Past that one touched in her, the American past of a preponderant unthinkable queerness’ (Aut, pp. 73–4). Cousin Bob James belongs to the same inaccessible era and is preserved as a memento of the popularity of dancing in mid-century New York society, a comic-grotesque figure participating in some drawing-room dance of death. That ‘phenomenally lean and nimble choreographic hero’ is restored to a form of immortality in his celebration of the dance, a man who ‘almost ghost-fashion, led the cotillion on from generation to generation, his skull-like smile, with its accent from the stiff points of his long moustache and the brightly hollow orbits of his eyes, helping to make of him an immemorial elegant skeleton’ (Aut, p. 26). These relatives belong to a distant era, at least a generation earlier than James’s own; having seen the America of the coming century, he designates and abandons them as even ‘queerer’ than he is, one of the ‘wiser witnesses’ (Aut, p. 74) who belongs to modernity, as he dryly comments. Caricatured as remote and scarcely human, they remain unquestionably, if theatrically, part of his own past and they embody, however artificially, some commonplace of human experience – thwarted intention, tragic isolation, the exercise of power endorsed by subservient family. They may have represented experience beyond a ‘small boy’s’ grasp, only now to be accounted for by means of an eccentric voice or gesture in the manner of Dickens. They elicit from him his own moment of drama: his assertions ‘I see’, ‘I hear’, mark the energy of his triumphant attempt to retrieve and define that distant, even fantastical America of his infancy. However ‘queer’ and remote the protagonists retrieved by this means, it was in childhood – so he suggests – that James received his initiation into the

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application of drama in everyday life with a demonstration of the nature of the ‘scene’ and how it might, in at least two senses, be ‘made’. He watches a cousin, a little girl (again rebelling at bedtime) being warned by a parent not to make a scene: ‘“I insist on your not making a scene!”’ The ‘note’ was, for James – however exaggeratedly – ‘epoch-making’: ‘the simple phrase was from that moment so preposterously to “count” for me’. He had never before heard it – ‘it had never been addressed to us at home’, but already ‘it seemed freighted to sail so far; it told me so much about life’. Whatever the dynamics of domestic life in the James household, clearly the public display of temper had no place, suggesting a pervasive internalization or absorption of feelings and an absence of audience to conspire with in any ‘performance’. But this surreptitious moment of observation reveals to him the degree of individual choice in playing out such feelings: ‘Life at these intensities clearly became “scenes”; but the great thing, the immense illumination, was that we could make them or not as we chose’ (Aut, p. 107). Thus the mundane can be transformed by improvised or calculated performance, made into a drama through personality and personal volition. It is as if this young cousin, in threatening to cross the line of discipline, has awakened in James a further variant on the phrase, and proposed the possibility of a future compositional method, the dramatic scène à faire.32

Part Two A Small Boy and Others had never got as far as the family letters which originally initiated the Family Book project because, as James confessed, ‘I overflowed so much more than I intended about my babyhood’.33 They finally appear in Notes of a Son and Brother, released into his hands and constituting a welcome duty of commemoration, after William’s death in 1910. Those early letters returned him to the 1860s, reminding him of the limitations, in comparison with his younger brothers, of his own American experience, and of his distance from the decisive events of national history. His memoir also indicates some consideration on James’s part of the accommodation of the artist within an American tradition; he thinks of Hawthorne and the day of his death, but also of the painter John La Farge, whom he regards as a prime influence on his literary and critical development. La Farge also died in the late autumn of 1910, but his creative life had been sustained in an American context, and James attended a retrospective exhibition of his works early in 1911. The collection of letters – he also came into possession of a set written by Minny Temple (who had died in 1870) during the writing of the volume – may well have accentuated the fact of his being a final survivor, in possession of posthumous evidence and reputations, and compelling him to consider his own life in relation to nation and family. Certainly the fiction with which James was involved in this final decade, much of it with an American set-

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ting, suggests, in what he writes about and how he writes, a sense of release. It is this narrative in which James returns to his young manhood and offers some outlines for the formation of his identity as man of letters that I want now to turn. Letters, both read and unread, had a powerful, revelatory presence in James’s fiction from early in his career and many important scenes of his mature fiction turn simply upon what a letter may contain. A letter addressed to Gray Fielder is placed, unopened, in the ornamental ivory tower in the unfinished novel of that name, so that, in effect, it is rendered doubly silent. In one of the first of James’s melodramatic short stories, ‘De Grey: A Romance’, the dependent young girl (who significantly takes on a symbolic role of female vampire) is enchanted by the hero’s letters home and the vicarious opportunities they offer. In the most innocent if acquisitive way she has, unknown to him, invaded his privacy and possessed him through the medium: Introduced, as it seemed to her that she had been by his letters, into the precincts of his personality, the mystery of his being, the magic circle of his feelings and opinions and fancies; wandering by his side, unseen, over Europe, and treading, unheard, the sounding pavements of famous churches and palaces, she felt that she tasted for the first time of the substance and sweetness of life.34

The content of the family papers which became available to James on William’s death describes an even broader ‘magic circle’ of information. In characterizing his own role in finalizing and fixing an account of those years, James confesses that he is a ‘chronicler too memory-ridden’ (Aut, p. 358). The text attends to the physical presence of the letters before him, just as the box of documents available for the composition of William Wetmore Story and his Friends forms an influential part of his biographical discourse. Now as he handles the materials ‘with their faded marks upon them’ (Aut, p. 461), he is tangibly reminded that the present is ‘separated by long years from that time of our youth’. He has now become a selfdesignated guardian, ‘the first authority’, and he realizes the mortal perspective of his role, having rescued ‘so many of these values from the dark gulf ’, which had returned ‘thus clearly at the far end of time’ (Aut, p. 504). The writers are now all dead. They included William James, the young and often admired student in Germany and Switzerland, Wilky James detailing his soldiering days in South Carolina during the Civil War, Henry James, Senior, as the loving paterfamilias and, most powerfully and conclusively, Minny Temple made accessible through the poignant letters relating (with the directness and sharpness of Emily Dickinson or, indeed, Alice James) a pointedly domestic life confronting mortality.35 James takes on a somewhat deceptively deferential and mediating role, with a range of figurative language implying his menial function in the transmission of these voices. Subservience is only a feature of his narrative, however: in reality, in the preparation and presentation of the letters, James has exercised that admit-

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ted ‘first authority’. The seemingly documentary ‘evidence’ is accommodated to the author’s autobiographical emphases and wishes, devoted to the development of the inscribed self and to the thematic needs of the text itself. The letters before him ‘plead’ for presentation (Aut, p. 267) and James is rendered helpless by the revived voice, a victim of its blandishments: he confesses, looking at William’s letters, ‘I can really keep my hand from nothing, of whatever connection, that causes his intensity of animation and spontaneity of expression to revive’ (Aut, p. 321). He is touched by ‘a ghostly hand’ which offers ‘more volumes than I can the least account for’ (Aut, p. 471). If he opens ‘the door’ to such ghostly, importuning presences (such doors more frequently stand at a threshold of terror or illumination36) he may be met by a scene of Dantean pathos to which he cannot say ‘no’: ‘The one difficulty is that to open that general door into the limbo of old letters, charged with their exquisite ghostly appeal, is almost to sink into depths of concession’ (Aut, p. 263).37 Yet despite these overwhelming plaints from the dead (the apologetic mode is prevalent), James exercises the fullest control, revising these documents and thus the detail of his own past self in relation to the correspondents. While the past is attributed supernatural power he relegates himself to a mundane servility. This is the role he adopted in that major investment of time in these late years, the revisionary and theorizing processes culminating in the New York Edition of his work. In the textual revisions, as he records, ‘the first-born of [his] progeny’ have been subjected to a tidy- and brush-up in their journey as ‘awkward infants’ ‘from the nursery to the drawing-room’. Nothing was to escape the attentions of this nurse-maid-cum-governess in introducing her charges to the formalities of public attention: the ‘flash of an anxious needle’ can be glimpsed, the ‘audible splash of soap-and-water’38 heard as those distant creations are brought forward once again, freshly turned out. In this self-mocking gender-querying typical of the effrontery of his later years, James suggests the compulsion which drove him to redraft and reshape the ideas of those dead correspondents and whatever ghosts remained. In this gender transformation he has modelled himself on one of the principal Victorian paradigms – the governess.39 Something of this domestic, or backstage role which James has assumed in his later editorial function is reflected in the sense of exclusion he recalls in relation to his younger brothers, their youthful experience, and the witness it bears to the history of the American nation. He recalls the great scenes and place names of the Civil War, part, as he says, of ‘the museum … of the soul’s curiosities’, but his own early manhood experience is passive and feminized. Whereas James recalls pacing a Newport garden on that ‘long hot July 1st of ’63’ in ‘almost ignobly safe stillness’ (Aut, pp. 422–3), listening, impossibly, for the ‘boom of far-away guns’ and waiting for news of that incursion into Northern territory, the battle of Gettysburg, his brothers Bob and Wilky have been exposed to the richest

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experience – ‘the scenes and circumstances, the passages of history’ a ‘wondrous opportunity of vision’, a freedom to observe which he himself (echoing Matthew Arnold) might have better used, that ‘appreciation of the thing seen … all of it, by my conviction, portentous and prodigious’ (Aut, p. 460). He suggests the irony of his missing this chance, his longing ‘to live’ by his eyes, whilst for them the opportunity ‘gloriously overflowed’, whatever the mortal danger. He is confined to ‘seeing, sharing, envying, applauding, pitying, all from too far-off ’. The younger brothers’ later failed cotton enterprise in Florida initiates a similar frustration, ‘a sign of material wasted, my material not being in the least the crops unproduced or unsold, but the precious store of images ungathered’ (Aut, p. 461).40 The dedicated observer has been deprived, specifically of young American experience, just as it had been thought best that he and William should not accept cousin Albert’s invitation to visit the ‘wild property’ of Beaverkill, a place ‘in the wilderness, incalculably distant’ (Aut, p. 72), as he archly describes it. Now, near the end of his life, and having answered the ‘solicitation of Europe’ (Aut, p. 82), James ventures to speculate on an alternative past founded on an American identity, within a culture whose evolving features he recently attempted to describe in The American Scene. That account is far from simply documentary, reaching unexpected levels of interiority; ‘The Jolly Corner’ was to enact on a more disturbing psychic level the confrontation between the flawed achieved self and the physically present ghost of his more aggressive or masculine alternative, as if suggesting that his decamping to Europe has deepened that feminized tendency. After the scenes of Jamesian family life recalled in A Small Boy and Others as a sequence of small-scale Dickensian caricatures, Notes of a Son and Brother offers broader, more historically grounded versions of America. The country of Henry, Senior’s youth is constructed in James’s memories of his father’s anecdote of a trip from Albany to New York, accompanied by ‘“Billy Taylor”, the Negro servant’ who had ‘ruled’ from ‘the point of view of effect’, and who is allotted as an ‘apparition’ a ‘dignity’. However diminished as an individual by having his name enclosed within quotation marks, ‘black Billy Taylor’ in his ‘almost epic shape’ performs the role of the ‘inimitable’ circus clown with Henry James, Senior, cast as ‘the ringmaster … of the American circus, the small circus of two’ which had so amused ‘our Irish cousins’ and, much later, his immediate family in the retelling. Whatever the racial anxieties of this episode revived for its comic incongruity, or as a ‘picture-recovering “story”’ (Aut, pp. 396–8), it offers James a metonymic model, however reductive or caricatured, of the ‘American circus’ exemplified by the slight white man equipped with a whip in mutually dependent relationship with a larger, comically subversive but ultimately deferring black person as a form of entertainment for his expatriate Irish kin. Without reverting to earlier generations James, of course, has his own repertoire of memories of

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national crisis, Lincoln’s murder, for instance, causing one of the ‘sharpest vibrations … communicated from the public consciousness’. The remembered death of Nathaniel Hawthorne in May 1864 leads James to recall his grief and to return to his own bedroom and a situation which embodies an inescapably American experience, implying in its detail a national as well as personal innocence: ‘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 … I sit in my belated bed, I say, and yield to the pang that made me positively and loyally cry’ (Aut, pp. 477–8). James’s discourse with its plain, parallel phrases, the idiosyncratic superlative formulation of ‘open’ and the declamatory ‘I say’, celebrates some earlier simplicity, appropriately echoing Whitman’s style and candour (on whom he revised his opinion after forty years).41 Even in the late 1870s when engaged on his biography of Hawthorne, James (still designated ‘Junior’ and thus contained within the family hierarchy) had located in the writer’s diaries ‘a simple, democratic, thinly composed society’; his catalogue of what America lacks is notorious, but he goes on to record, by means of Hawthorne’s observations that the American has his ‘secret, his joke’ and his consoling ‘“American humour”’.42 The Henry James, Senior, letters which are included in Notes of a Son and Brother allow James access to that earlier generation, and they record too a sense of lost innocence. Even in the eyes of the older James, Hawthorne belongs to a plainer, and simpler society. Noticing him at a Boston dining club, he comments that he looks like ‘a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of detectives’, or ‘some contented sprawling Concord owl … brought blindfold into that brilliant daylight’. As if anticipating his son’s later sense of puzzlement at what America meant and what it was incomprehensibly becoming, he comments that the ‘old world is breaking up on all hands’, though he catches a reassuring ‘glimpse of the everlasting granite’ in Hawthorne (Aut, pp. 360–1). When, in the Hawthorne biography, the younger James described the site of his death in Plymouth, ‘one of the stations of approach to the beautiful mountain scenery of New Hampshire’, at the local hotel, ‘a vast white edifice, adjacent to the railway station, and entitled the Pemigiwasset House’,43 he introduced, significantly, two of what would become his most important emblems for American society on which The American Scene elaborates: hotel life and railway travel. James has come, in this cultural moment of three and a half decades later, to value Hawthorne as ‘appreciably American’, discarding the cultural caveats so prevalent in his early biography. The ‘extraordinary value’ of his prose lies in its ‘tone’, exemplifying ‘to what a use American matter could be put by an American hand’, pointing ‘the happiest moral’ that ‘an American could be an artist … without “going outside” about it’; indeed Hawthorne had become an artist ‘just by being American enough’ (Aut, p. 480). The revised opinion of Hawthorne marks

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a more general relaxation, a late speculation on the option of America as a basis for a life in art. Newport, the location of the James family’s return from Europe and the choice for young William James to study art with William Morris Hunt (having previously attended classes in Paris), could not have been more appropriate. On the shores of Rhode Island but facing Europe, it offered ‘a basis of reconciliation to “America” when the habit, the taking for granted, of America had been broken or intermitted’ (Aut, p. 280). The America marked out by quotation marks seems to signify the place freshly apprehended, with a potential for aesthetic and critical growth distinct from the experience of Europe: no longer that ‘queer’, grotesque land of childhood associations. The town, with its European spirit, occupied a ‘remedial’ role, a ‘point of reattachment’ for the family.44 When he saw some paintings, ‘modest little Newport harmonies’, exhibited in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in early 1911, during his final stay in America, James had a sensation ‘as of a plummet suddenly dropped into obscure depths long unstirred’ (Aut, p. 296) as he was returned to the familiar Rhode Island landscape of the 1860s. The painter was ‘our Franco-American’ (Aut, p. 288), John La Farge, friend and exemplar for James in youth, and student at Hunt’s workshop. Having died just a few months after William James, La Farge is represented in James’s reminiscences as the exemplary artist, a reader of European literature, with extensive European credentials, looking ahead to an admirable career based in America. The most heroic and romantic of figures, he becomes immediately someone who ‘counts’, one of the small number of ‘scattered notches in the long plain stick’ of his acquaintances (Aut, p. 275).45 In a family cupboard filled with salmon-coloured Revues des Deux Mondes, constituting the greatest European critical and creative traditions, and endowed, it seems, with life, ‘bristling or rather flowering with precious particulars’, this ‘most completely accomplished friend’ acted as the indispensable guide: ‘one would have wandered or stumbled about in it quite alone if it hadn’t been that La Farge was somehow always in it with us’ (Aut, p. 288). James’s apologetically admitted desire to be ‘just literary’ will here find a ‘sacred connection’ as he crosses that revelatory threshold, opening ‘the door of the big square closet, to the like of which Europe had never treated us, 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’ (Aut, p. 413). The transforming moment contains the generous proportions of the American ‘capacious closet’ as well as its stimulating contents of European culture. James, designated as ‘Angel’ by members of his family, can join this gathered ‘choir of breathing angels’. This private scene is enacted at the time of the Civil War: James has (literally) turned his back on his native continent and its challenges to manhood for quiet devotions to art and literature. Recording his anxiety as to the need of ‘provision

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against either assault or dearth’ and withstanding any ‘indefinite siege’ (referring to the war and, ‘more particularly’, New England’s subjection to the growing influence of New York), he likes to imagine this cupboard as ‘a store of edibles, both substantial and succulent, and of a hoard of ammunition for the defence of any breach’ (Aut, p. 288). The war remains notably contained within those figurative confines. He has, at the same time, joined a fraternity, as he stresses: it was ‘our care, our privilege … our felt felicity’ to ‘read devoutly into everything, and as straight as possible, the very fullest meaning we might hope it would learn to have’. Merely perusing the Revue he feels ‘the fairly golden glow of romance’ and a ‘spell cast’; he is remorseless – ‘quite shamelessly an inquirer, a hunter, for charm’. The memory of ‘some divine insufflation’, an inspiration carrying the promise of ‘the “literary and artistic”’, remains capable of moving him (Aut, pp. 281–2). Under the guiding presence of John La Farge, he found in the periodical ‘all that was finest in the furniture and fittings of romance’, and indeed, in contrast with that comically utilitarian reference to house contents, the terms magic and romance recur in these pages. In their ‘serried rows’, the ‘firm salmoncoloured blocks’ offered ‘an alternative sphere of habitation’ (Aut, pp. 287–8).46 To James’s ‘fond fancy’ John La Farge is transformed and mythologized as the spirit of European culture: ‘out of the vast rich home of the Revue he practically stepped, and into it, with all his ease, he mysteriously returned again’. James admits that to his ‘charmed’, ‘predisposed’ mind La Farge was cast as a protagonist from the Revue’s ‘full charged stream of fiction’, the embodiment of a George Sand hero. The painter is unquestionably unique and strange, a precious exhibit to be preserved, standing ‘on a stage so unpeopled and before a scene so unpainted’ that he becomes in this provincial context an exhibit, a figure ‘fit for any glass case that its vivacity should allow to enclose it … surrounded by wondering, admiring and often quite inevitably misconceiving observers’ (Aut, pp. 288–9). He is recalled by the novelist as an exotic figure, himself a potential subject for a painting: ‘jacketed in black velvet or clad from top to toe in old-time elegances of cool white’ (a recollection owing something to the painter’s important self-portrait of 1859), he once again gallops along ‘the shining Newport sands in far-away summer sunsets on a charming chestnut mare whose light legs and fine head and great sweep of tail showed the Arab strain’ (Aut, p. 291). He might have ‘borrowed his mount from the adorable Fromentin’, James imagines, alluding to the accomplished North African-inspired subjects of the French painter and writer Eugène Fromentin – finely executed scenes of horses and hunting, beautifully coloured and finished.47 If Hawthorne had touched the autobiographer as a product of an earlier America, La Farge, just a little older than James himself, is regarded as holding the promise of an artistically secure future. In a romantic effusion he feels once more ‘a charm of thrilled good faith, the flush and throb of crowding apprehensions’ as he

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bottles ‘this imponderable extract of the loitering summers of youth’ (Aut, p. 296). His memories themselves take on the limpid qualities of watercolours: ‘Occasions and accidents come back to me under their wash of that distilled old Newport light’ (Aut, p. 292), as if he recalls the La Farge landscapes recently seen. In that ‘plummet’ into ‘obscure depths’, he finds ‘a hundred memories’ which have ‘laid bare the very footsteps of time’ (Aut, p. 296). Those paintings have allowed for ‘the possibility of nuance, or in other words for picture and story’,48 on, as James states, ‘our side of the world’, as if he has again integrated himself within an American tradition. James had himself served, of course, as the artist’s model for a portrait,49 but those youthful days spent painting alongside La Farge (at which he now wonders), or sharing a breakfast of coffee and griddle cakes which was ‘not as other earthly refreshment’ (Aut, p. 297), cast the younger man as the ‘mere helpless admirer and inhaler’ of the painter, overwhelmed by his ‘consummate, his raffiné taste’ (Aut, pp. 293–4). It had struck James and his small Newport circle even at the time when they saw the canvas of the aptly named Paradise Rocks that this was an unrepeatable experience, ‘that no such range of airs would ever again be played for us on but two or three silver strings’ (Aut, p. 299).50 And when Verena Tarrant and Basil Ransom take their romantic walks from Marmion in The Bostonians along the coast or in the woods ‘where accident had grouped the trees with odd effects of “style”, and where in grassy intervals and fragrant nooks of rest they came out upon sudden patches of Arcady’,51 this is presumably the landscape which had earlier inspired La Farge. James relegates the picturesque memories to antiquity, containing episodes ‘as rare and deep and beautiful as a passage of old poetry, a scrap of old legend’ (Aut, p. 297), but La Farge’s principal message suggested that ‘the arts were after all essentially one’ (Aut, p. 294), a vibrant prospect which for James had made ‘the future flush and warm’ (Aut, p. 287). Like George Sand, Balzac, whom he referred to as ‘the whole tormented, incredible man’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 134), was to preoccupy James for a lifetime, and La Farge early on revealed what lay behind ‘that formidably-plated door’ of his novels. In rereading the opening of Eugénie Grandet James is able still to see the artist’s young face ‘between the lines as through blurred prison bars’, as if he has himself become a part of that bleak provincial milieu of Balzac’s novel. It was this same ‘expository ghost’ which had led him to translate Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille, one of the ‘sudden milestones … on the road of so much inward or apprehensive life’ (Aut, p. 292).52 La Farge invariably ‘opened more windows than he closed’ and on this occasion plunges James’s eyes ‘straight into the square and dense little formal garden of Mérimée’ (Aut, p. 294). It is, in retrospect, a formative moment: surely Mérimée might ‘serve’ for him? He attributes to this insight a whole future dedicated to resolution of aesthetic issues. ‘Didn’t I already see, as I fumbled with a pen, of what the small dense garden might be inspiringly symbolic?’ Yet the La Farge of those

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earlier days, ‘our guest … so lingeringly, so abidingly and supersedingly present’, is already beyond James’s Newport circle, having reached a further ‘finished and launched’ stage: twice characterized as ‘a man of the world’ (Aut, pp. 294, 292, 290) he stands as a herald of a future movement in art, ‘an embodiment of the gospel of esthetics’, a nature ‘of wondrous homogeneity’. He is already ‘armourproof ’, having embraced ‘the serenity’, ‘the principle of the imperturbable’ (Aut, pp. 290, 295) which seems to elevate him to the classical impersonality of the greatest art.53 The tropes of containment and incarceration by means of which James characterizes his exposure to the influences that would shape his development as man of letters include, paradoxically, the availability of liberation and a congenial space for experiment – the gift of La Farge’s Newport presence. The painter’s death and the 1911 retrospective of his work confirmed for James, as well as the European range of his interests, his exemplary American completion as an artist.54 One final event occurring as James was reaching the end of Notes of a Son and Brother in 1914 which retrieved even more tangibly the period of youth (like some incident from his fiction) was the arrival of a collection of Mary Temple’s letters, one of his orphaned cousins, who had died of tuberculosis in 1870 at the age of twentyfour. Indeed her death, the conclusion of what he calls ‘her rich short story’ (Aut, p. 539), marked for both William and Henry James ‘the end of our youth’ (Aut, p. 544). Her role as the inspiration for some of the novelist’s most important heroines is well known. Having completed his memorial to Minny, and three-quarters of the rest of Notes of a Son and Brother, James received the letters from William’s widow, Alice Howe Gibbens James; they had been written to John Chipman Gray, who had passed them to her rather than have them destroyed.55 Gray was another member of that youthful circle, who became the Harvard Law Professor of whom James had a distant view, as he records it in The American Scene.56 Their arrival assigned a final duty for James, as he suggests. Having read the letters (with such irresistible tears!) I recognised my chance to do what I had always longed in some way to do without seeing quite how – rescue & preserve in some way from oblivion, commemorate & a little enshrine, the image of our admirable & exquisite, our noble & unique little Minnie. It was not easy to do with all the right tact & taste – & there was danger that the long lapse of time would too much have bedimmed & weakened everything. But there at last was my material & my occasion, & I embraced them with all the art & all the piety of which I was capable.57

The language of his initial commemoration of Minny Temple earlier in the volume is distinctive. A ‘young and shining apparition’, she had appealed to James in her ‘vividest lustre, an essence that preserves her still’. Her memory is ‘coloured’ by ‘reflections of the War’, and derived from ‘irrepressible private founts’. Notably absent from this portrait is the lingering physical detail which typifies James’s

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accounts of the young men and soldiers involved in this same war. ‘Slim and fair and quick’, with ‘almost sliding steps’ and a ‘renouncing laugh’, she emerges predominantly in a series of abstractions, full of ‘light spontaneity and curiosity … a sublimely forewarned curiosity’, ‘the supreme case of a taste for life as life’. Even a more concrete reference becomes diminished to a more conventionalized, exemplary status: ‘She had in her brief passage the enthusiasm of humanity – more, assuredly, than any charming girl who ever circled, and would fain have continued to circle, round a ballroom’. James confesses that in those Newport days it was unclear whether she was ‘just the most moving of maidens or a disengaged and dancing flame of thought’, that incorporeal quality hinting at her fatal consumptive condition. Of all the Albany ‘cousinage’, Minny is recalled as the ‘rarest, though at the same time symptomatically or ominously palest, flower of the stem’. Apparitional, echoing, flame-like, gleaming – these are the features of the girl he had promised to meet in Rome on his European trip of 1869–70. But she had ‘burned herself out’ before this could happen (Aut, pp. 282–4). And very quickly, James would interiorize this loved girl and in some sense assimilate her with a dubious acquisitiveness, reflecting her variety in a sequence of fictional young women. Just three weeks after her death he wrote to William, ‘The more I think of her the more perfectly satisfied I am to have her translated from this changing realm of fact to the shady realm of thought’.58 Yet he also regrets, whatever the redeeming aspect of Minny’s ‘translation’, that he himself had failed in manliness towards her, though he may simply be seeking some endorsement by thus imagining himself in a hetero-normative relation: She never knew how sick and disordered a creature I was and I always felt that she knew me at my worst. I always looked forward with a certain eagerness to the day when I should have regained my natural lead, and one friendship on my part at least might become more active and masculine.59

He may refer here to his back complaint, or perhaps digestive problems, or even (and more likely) his non-combatant status as a code for his inactivity, his inability to perform like the other young men of the circle. When, towards the end of the volume and now in receipt of her letters, James reintroduces Minny Temple, she is linked with another girl, also long and prematurely dead, Lizzie Boott, whom with her father, Francis, James had known in their expatriate Florentine days. With Lizzie, so long as she herself ‘escaped the waiting shears’, he had celebrated his cousin’s ‘memory’ in ‘a blest and sacred rite’, though his readers may have suspected him (as he invites them to) of ‘treating an inch of canvas to an acre of embroidery’ (Aut, p. 521). Minny’s letters introduce another ‘complete’ life, her questions, rebellions and aspirations remaining unanswered, documenting the young girl’s uncertain confrontation with mortality, ‘the demon of the Why, Whence, Whither?’ (Aut, p. 539), as she moves

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from physician to physician, and a corresponding variety of medical opinions. But the young woman who quotes from St Paul, dismisses social proprieties and ‘the custom for maidens’, who confesses ‘there is no comfort in life away from people who care for you’ (Aut, pp. 525–6), who tells of mishaps with a pony and trap, who hopes to spend a recuperative winter in California, has been edited and shaped by James himself. It has been shown that in these extensive selections of her letters ‘there was scarcely a sentence he did not emend [sic]’.60 As with his brother’s letters, James has assumed the ‘first authority’ once again, so that the realigned, even marginalized, figure who emerges plays its designated role within the narrative he has determined in retrieving his own self. In the public discourse of Notes of a Son and Brother he concedes that he may not quite catch again ‘the bristling image’ of the moment, yet it is possible – ‘such is the magic of old letters on its subtlest occasions’ – to ‘reconstitute … to a vivid probability’ certain events from the past. The process is imagined as a scene of heroic proportions as history collaborates with him: he ‘seems’ to see ‘the very muse of history take a fresh scroll in order to prepare to cover it, in her very handsomest hand, well before my eyes’. If this suggests events still to be inscribed, the notepaper still untouched and salutation to be penned, he has no compunction about adjusting available records, making decisions which are as influential as these grandiose gestures of history itself. Yet looking at the opening of a letter which details the wedding of one of Minny’s cousins, James maintains his spectator role, held by the ironies of time and unfolding knowledge: ‘Covered is it now for me with that abounding and interesting life of the generations then to come at the pair of preliminary flourishes ushering in the record of which I thus feel myself still assist’ (Aut, p. 530). James uses the term ‘assist’ as ‘to be present’ in its primary French rather than English sense, but of course this is a self-deprecating gesture – in keeping with much of his self-characterization. He continues in the last pages of Notes of a Son and Brother to find the figurative landscape through which the historian must travel littered with snares and dangers, confessing his fear of ‘the traps too often successfully set for my wandering feet’ (Aut, p. 521). The letters he holds contain solicitations into other stories, explanations and narrative byways, temptations past which he must ‘hurry on without so much as a glance’. He detects ‘the mouth of a trap’ in any potential biographical gloss he might offer, ‘a shaft sunk so straight down into matters interesting and admirable and sad and strange’ but which must remain now ‘an infinitely mixed and a heavily closed past’. He must ignore ‘the bribes to recognition and recovery’ which ‘mercilessly multiply’. With no reference to his editorial manipulations, James pictures himself as a comic, dwarfed and incongruous figure, overwhelmed by history’s transcendent scale – ‘the sense … of sitting rather queerly safe and alone, though as with

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a dangle of legs over the edge of a precipice, on the hither side of great gulfs of history’ (Aut, pp. 532–3). By his own admission, James can only lay the ghost of a young woman, dead at twenty-four, ‘who would have given anything to live’, ‘by wrapping it in the beauty and dignity of art’, her loss compensated for only ‘a little’ by ‘our sense of the tragic’ (Aut, pp. 544, 528). After the sequence of heroines she had inspired, James’s final possession of Mary Temple is illustrated by these edited letters within a text which continuously records the treacheries and ironies of time. To T. S. Perry he confesses to finding ‘strange and moving our survivorship of that golden haze of all the ancient history’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 685). The sentiments at such moments of retrospection, however strong, can never sideline James’s own conviction as an artist – an avocation which can even permit him to edit and rewrite the original documentary evidence with impunity. He regarded this gift as little less than a means of survival and an affirmation of life, however isolating the calling, or deviant the appearance. In some frequently quoted lines written to his nephew Harry, he explains the relentless burden of dispassionateness which had, from the beginning, been made the condition for the gathering of impressions: You see I still, in presence of life … have reactions – as many as possible – and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It’s, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions – appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and “enjoy” (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing – and I do. I believe I shall do yet again – it is still an act of life.61

In evaluating his self-representation within the ‘fine silver thread’ of the text (having left behind any of the original family duties indicated by the titles), James remains diffident, even insouciant. At a late stage in his career, yet self-effacing and flexible, he asserts his own belated willingness to fill in. The ‘personal history … of an imagination’ had always struck him ‘as a task that a teller of tales might rejoice in’; in the absence of any comer, it strikes him ‘in a shape almost too familiar at first for recognition’ that, in staging ‘these recoveries and reflections’, he himself might ‘in default of a better’ take on the role of ‘hero of a hundred possible fields’. Not having found anyone else in the marketplace, with time spent and much looking in wrong places (‘some finding and launching, let alone much handling’), he realizes he would have to ‘do’, willing at least, in pursuit of the desired ‘objective’, to turn ‘nothing less’ than himself ‘inside out’. In this way, a ‘man of imagination’ – and ‘of an “awfully good” one’ – might yet might emerge ‘for the hero of a hundred possible fields’ (Aut, pp. 454–5). It is this self-deferring ‘hero’, who can be assigned to his role as creator of the late fiction, that I shall discuss in the following final chapters.

9 ‘A N INFLUENCE BEYOND MY NOTATION’: THE SELF-REFLEXIVE FIGURES OF ‘THE JOLLY CORNER’

In the pages of The American Scene James constructed his own America of the twentieth century and its fearsome appetite for change and renewal, as well as its astounding wealth.1 He is both shocked and excited by the experience, which seems to have penetrated his sensibility at the most intimate level, drawing him into an assessment of his own American history and of his adopted career in letters. The autobiographical volumes which succeeded the 1910–11 trip, the death of William James and the release of letters from those formative years, mark a more formal return to personal history. Both projects remained incomplete: the second planned volume of The American Scene recording his journey to the West Coast was never begun, and he wrote only a few pages of The Middle Years, the third volume of autobiography. The last fifteen years of his writing life were characterized, therefore, not merely by revision but also, to an extent, by incompletion: two important novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, remained unfinished and were published posthumously by Percy Lubbock. But though James suffered periods of ill-health and depression, these years also contained renewal and the opportunity to reflect on his own most elaborately developed intuitions: the return to America disclosed in the most (literally) pressing and personal way the variety and significance of his early American years whilst exposing him to a present which dismisses old-time or European values, where society sees little need for deference, and even promotes an alienating proliferation of versions of English. James had proclaimed to his native land, in the oracular style of Walt Whitman that ‘You are not final … You are perpetually provisional’ (AS, pp. 407–8). One of his own final epic projects addressing the provisional in his own works was the New York Edition, a task undertaken after his return from America and before he wrote ‘The Jolly Corner’. In this renovation and reformulating of his own public body of work James has re-enacted those scenes of emergent twentieth-century nationhood and dedicated the major enterprise to his earliest – 138 –

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origins by naming it after the city where he was born. The action illustrates, as Ross Posnock indicates, ‘his late discovery of revision as the matrix of writing, identity, and nationhood’.2 He may have realized, indeed, the liberating nature of revision: ‘the “New York” in the name of James’s edition suggests that he ultimately saw his oeuvre, and his identity as an author, as similarly “provisional”, as achievements best memorialized by an openness to many stories, rather than an exclusive commitment to one’.3 Dencombe, the author–protagonist of ‘The Middle Years’, in his desire to postpone arrival at that ‘final’ condition of the self,4 suggests James’s awareness of this tendency. A late and liberating accession, or revision, of selfhood, a newly orientated or even unashamed accommodation of an identity, finds a voice within the freedoms of some of the late and relatively neglected fiction. First, I want to consider one of the great (and less neglected) short stories, ‘The Jolly Corner’, which realigns and internalizes James’s recent American experience. Its hero, Brydon Spencer, in his ‘so strangely belated return to America’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 194),5 can be read as a version of the expatriate James returning to New York in the new century who, rather than having his past wrenched from him by witnessing the destruction of a former home (such as Washington Place in New York or Ashburton Place in Boston, a form of mutilation recorded in The American Scene), is reunited, amongst the crowded evidence of change all around, with the family home of his youth. Brydon’s reclaiming of the house on ‘the jolly corner’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 195) develops into a search for his own alter ego – the fiftysix-year-old man he might have become, whom he pursues and is pursued by, in that combination of contradictory stances recorded in the nightmare set in the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon.6 That pattern of aggression turning to abject passivity marks the unresolved psychic tensions of the tale. The expatriate with his own shameful European past – a kind of internalized heart of darkness7 – has pursued the masculine, business-dedicated ‘other’, the kind of individual scorned by the young James family whose father specifically distanced himself from any ‘professional’ calling at all.8 He is a grotesque, mature example of that type whose face James had seen as part of the nation’s future, recruited to an expanding Harvard and forming part of the crowds of thrusting young commuters on the New Jersey ferry. They constituted in James’s imagination, as he implies, a fearsome and triumphant version of heterosexual identity. But this desired figure finally turns on him, a beautiful image from some childhood magic lantern show, but with a mutilated hand. Overwhelmed, he loses consciousness, reawakening in the arms of his old female friend, Miss Staverton, a figure from an unfallen, youthful, pre-European past, a loving but worryingly omniscient presence. With an elaborate and energetic evaluation of its own language features (though its discourse occasionally reaches a point of having to admit, despite this

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virtuosity, to being lost for words) and a figurative density which seems limitless, ‘The Jolly Corner’ reveals James at his most playful yet controlled, another variant on the occasionally invoked man of letters of the autobiographical volumes. The degree of specificity arising within the narrative varies widely. Abstraction and ambiguity increase in correspondence with the most complex or most emotionally intense episodes, James taking pleasure in predicating a crucial shift of tone or potential event on the most innocent or familiar phrase, the most commonplace coinage. This disparity between the level of attention paid to a subject and its wayward refusal to come into focus denotes a linguistic gloss on the tale’s central construction – the obsessive quest of a man for his alter ego, that other figure, and the seeming impossibility of defining the experience. In this horror story, which induced in William James a ‘Poe-like creeping of the flesh’,9 Spencer Brydon confronts not merely the consequences of alternative career choices or continents on which to live; the true ghost of this ghost story embodies a personal identity revealing the repressed ‘other’, the psychosexual formation of a lifetime, suggesting the widest ranging meditation by James on his own interior self. A letter written by James at the time touches on the powerful role played by the New York location. He had stayed for a time with Mrs Mary Cadwalader Jones in Greenwich Village, as Cushing Strout points out, before he refers to Adeline Tintner’s insight into James’s own confrontation with the disturbing expatriate experience which initiates the plot: ‘to establish the locus of the story Tintner shrewdly notes that James wrote Mrs Mary Cadwalader Jones … to tell her how in his writing he found the hours spent there living again, his “spirit gratefully haunting them always or rather how insidiously turning the tables they, the mystic locality itself, haunt and revisit my own departed identity”’.10 Aside from the allusions to the ghostly and his own former self, the phrase ‘turning the tables’ attracts narrative attention as the dynamics of Brydon’s relationship with his ‘other’ move him alternately between pursuit and flight. The tale’s biographical provenance is specific and powerful, noticeably selfreflexive, an examination of emotional and sexual need or unresolved, even unacknowledged unhappiness, a longing for the absent finally recognized and confronted, a consequence of what Leon Edel suggests to be James’s liberating but disappointed passion for the young sculptor Hendrik Andersen, amongst a series of friendships with young men. He has (perhaps at last and belatedly) entered the ‘imagination of loving’, with painful consequences.11 The cathartic (in Aristotelian as well as Freudian terms) and almost fatal confrontation with a lifetime’s repression is re-enacted in the fictional events of ‘The Jolly Corner’. The house around which Brydon creeps in solitary darkness (a house mysteriously other than the house of fiction or imagination), longing yet also fearful, controlling but sometimes hunted, with many rooms whose doors remain both

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significantly open and closed, vertiginous depths and heights, progresses up and down front and back staircases, and coded hints of youthful, aesthetic discretion ‘when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 194) (as if by untimely fear and negation rather than assertion of the beautiful) readily suggests a symbolic projection of James’s long-contained sexual anxieties. The house becomes the site for a series of events which might come from a catalogue of Freudian dream features. ‘The Jolly Corner’ enacts a return in which the expatriate becomes the abject and obsessive dependent, recognizing, however prepared for change, that ‘the great fact … had been the incalculability’. If the experience can hardly be quantified or put into words, it is unsurprising that, for the man of letters, his means of ‘notation’ – often its inadequacy – should feature within the text itself. The narrator’s falling silent without specifically deferring responsibility, and, at other times, signalling his limited expressive resources at crucial moments, suggests more than rhetorical contrivance. The grammar in a spoken admission of love or fidelity, for instance, introduces the past subjunctive or conditional, even the negative or interrogative, as if, one might speculate, this is how James asserts himself. Alternatively, the idiosyncrasy might well be relegating the conventionally romantic so as to attend to the obsessive theme of the ghostly ‘other’, a figure which mixes threat, seductiveness and vulnerability, and triumphs even in abjection. From the beginning Brydon trades in imprecise abstraction whose superlatives proportionately and ironically undermine meaning. Asked, on his return to New York, what he thinks of ‘everything’, he admits to ‘begging or dodging the question’ on ‘so big a subject’, ‘something that concerns only myself ’: ‘It would have taken a century … to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 193–4). Language seems to fail or force him into deviant usage: he will begin to revise himself in the light of this revised, repellent city, ‘the vast wilderness of the wholesale’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 196). In this inimical twentieth-century setting Miss Staverton, with the authority of age, sympathy and knowledge, offers sanctuary; here she occupies ‘a small still scene where items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the scent of a garden’. ‘As exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower’, what indeed can she spare? ‘Delicately frugal’ she is found ‘in the afternoon of life’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 196–7). After the conclusive deathly encounter with his own lost self he finds his ‘head pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly refreshing fragrance’, ‘her lap an ample and perfect cushion to him’ and, unmanned, he finally pleads, ‘“Oh keep me, keep me!”’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 226, 228). In a tale so full of climbing and descending and where erect presences are imagined as waiting in

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darkness, this final prostration signifies the flatness and erotic torpor of sexual and social acceptance (or acceptability). The idea of a woman’s redemptive power is sketched out in a more altruistic light in a note of 1895 in which James ponders the possibility of a failed man or artist seen as his once promising self only by ‘some woman’. The ‘dead self ’ includes the former ‘genius, talent, vocation’; the failed man is supported in ‘his recovering a little of the lost joy, of the Dead Self, in his intercourse with some person, some woman, who knows what that self was, in whom it still lives a little … It’s the woman’s sense of what might [have been] in him that arrives at the intensity.’12 James dismissed the idea at the time as banal, and the theme as revived in ‘The Jolly Corner’ with the ambiguities of what the man has ‘lost’ and the mystery of the woman’s solace has banished any sentimentalizing of her role. Indeed, Miss Staverton could be regarded as offering the reassurance or endorsement of hetero-normality. The situation returns to the distant event of Minny Temple’s death, reversing effects and adjusting nuances, in which the young James foresaw for himself, with her loss, an increased masculinity. With something of that dismissiveness towards women evident elsewhere, James endows Miss Staverton both with too much and yet too little knowledge, as if she must fail on either count.13 Notably she sees and guesses far more than the self-possessed male allows for, but she can also fall unaccountably silent or lapse into bland shallowness. Yet sharply intuitive, she has rescued him from death to offer a shared life expressed in syntax and tropes which serve, in effect, to reduce and qualify any future, denoting fragility and a preservation of the once beautiful but now incurably dead. Their distant shared past is characterized as ‘communities of knowledge’ – ‘“their” knowledge … of presences of the other age’: ‘this discriminating possessive was always on her lips’. She is not without design and is thus able to exert power over Brydon and his own version of the past. The conversations are predicated upon such terms as ‘communities’, ‘presences’, ‘vibrations’, as if to abstract and to diminish the dramatic spontaneity of normal talk. He remembers what she has said in a brief auditory metaphor which, in this tale whose crucial scenes play out in darkness and even with eyes closed, the narrative will return to; the words are recalled ‘for the small silver ring they had sounded over the queerest and deepest of his own lately most disguised and most muffled vibrations’. These obscure but felt ‘vibrations’ remain mysterious, touching upon his realized self and a sexuality which has been hinted at in a life ‘overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim to her’. She is an unknowing or magnanimous witness of his undisclosed shame. The constant burden is what he might have become – ‘If he had but stayed at home’, and the monosyllabic plainness of that played out history, the irrecoverable pluperfect conditional, nullifies such wonderings, ‘wanton’ as they are (CT, vol. XII, p. 197).

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Brydon himself ‘was to remember these words’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 197) and it is Miss Staverton who initiates this process of speculation from which she will emerge, after the cathartic triumph of the ‘other’, his victim, ‘abysmally passive’, to pronounce a final possession, ‘“And now I keep you”’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 227–8), echoing the menacingly ambiguous language of love and possession exploited in genres of horror and murder. Her reticent silence, described with Conradian informality – ‘“she didn’t rattle”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 201) – is admired by Brydon, though her quickness of ear and linguistic ingenuity form part of the tale’s almost baroque and witty pointing of plot by some casual phrase. Contemptuous of American values, he points out to her that the only reason for any transaction in New York is dollars – so let there be no other, ‘“not the ghost of one”’, for moving back into the family house. She unnervingly exposes his growing private obsession by asking, ‘“Are you very sure the ‘ghost’ of one doesn’t, much rather, serve –?”’ He turns pale and answers ‘between a glare and a grin’. If Miss Staverton doesn’t direct the plot, she marks its notable features. Having made the suggestion, she casts her eyes about: ‘the vista was large, through an open door, into the great main square saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between windows’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 202) and her apprehension of the house – the sense of looking from a distance, from assorted positions and angles and the living nature of the building caught in the brief figurative ‘brave’ space – anticipates how the narrative perspective is to influence any reading of events. Brydon self-defensively dismisses the idea and in an act of what might be regarded as projection invokes Mrs Muldoon, the Irish cleaning woman, as an agent of such superstition. As elsewhere in his ghost stories, James adroitly suggests a chilling correspondence between the sociable present and its dark, lonely antithesis. Earlier Brydon guesses Miss Staverton wants to know more about his nightly prowling, but he merely laughs, ‘starting the odd echo, the conscious human resonance … that sounds made while he was there alone sent back to his ear or his fancy’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 200). His companion is less deceived and penetrates this fancy or nightmare remembered in daytime normality, remaining unconvinced by this facile dismissal: ‘She might even for the minute, off there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly gathering’, and, hedged in by verbal qualification, goes on to clarify not the impression but a trope which invokes death and a disquieting sense of the unexpected or, rather, of not quite believing what you saw. ‘Simplified like the death-mask of a handsome face, it perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the stir of an expression in the “set” commemorative plaster’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 202). In this imagining of horror she reveals that she has seen the worst from the edge of the abyss, in a striking example of the abject, the collapse of distinction between subject and object or between the self and the other, making us behold ‘the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders’.14 This glimpse of horror is activated by a

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stirring of presumably male beauty, a possible allusion to the causes of Brydon’s life of dissolution in Europe. Miss Staverton’s intuition of some unnatural presence is a matter of speculation; at other times she is restrained by the conventional, even superficial – a model of social conformity. Returning to the subject of the house, she produces merely ‘a vague platitude’: ‘“Well, if it were only furnished and lived in –!”’. Her language has failed: ‘she passed straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her’. Brydon resolves to challenge her and to confess himself – ‘he risks’ speaking his ‘gathered answer’ – yet the simple words remain ambiguous in their significance: ‘“For me it is lived in. For me it is furnished.”’ But still this intelligent woman who guesses and deduces so much, fails to see. She offers respectful compliance as she agrees ‘all vaguely and discreetly’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 202–3), thinking of his dead family as representing ‘ineffaceable life’. Brydon, we must assume, is thinking of a different inhabitant. Yet what for Brydon is a venue for vibrant secretive encounters can, by contrast, figure as a mausoleum. He looks around as the two emerge from the front door, and, following the new century’s taste for (middle-) Eastern antiquity,15 is reminded of ‘the outer light of the Desert on the traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 203). The spot for Brydon is ‘consecrated’ and in a Hardyesque way the genteel furniture carries the imprint of his departed family, with its elegant doorknobs suggesting ‘the pressure of the palms of the dead’. The simple sensation of touch returns to him his childhood and he senses ‘the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the very air like microscopic motes’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 200–1). This may reflect some elegiac reflection on James’s part, but the house is hardly homely; on the contrary, it is unheimlich, thus unfamiliar and thence uncanny, a term whose range of significance is explored at the opening of Freud’s 1919 essay, ‘The “Uncanny”’. Using Jentsch’s ‘Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen’ of 1906, Freud offers some characteristics of the uncanny: ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate’.16 Aside from that stirring death mask, the old home is profoundly unhomely, sheltering an embodiment of the uncanny, most unsettlingly, Brydon’s own projected ‘other’ who belongs to the thoughts of other people too. Like a seer and prophetess Miss Staverton has visions and dreams which are entirely at the service of Bryden’s own interior life. As well as having acquired unexpectedly detailed knowledge of what he gets up to, she has dreamt of his other self, of his being overwhelmed to the point of death. Brydon yearns to see ‘the just so totally other person’ and she must concede that she has already twice met him. Yet ‘for reasons of her own’ which can be partially inferred later, she postpones telling him what he is like. In contrast, her idiolect typically avoids the concrete or declarative and her personal grammar could not be less assertive or more seemingly compliant. Earlier, when challenged by Brydon as to whether

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she would have liked him as his other self in ‘that way’, she twice asks (in reply), ‘“How should I not have liked you?”’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 205–7). In a discourse where whole narrative strands can turn on a cast-off phrase or, conversely, major statements seem cloaked in abstraction, it is fitting that she should admit love in this interrogative, negative, past, and implicitly conditional (rather than subjunctive) mode. Her final, simple triumph of possession denotes a change marked even in her speech pattern. Otherwise, in the explanatory exchange that follows the tale’s life-and-death climax when the romantic admissions are made, the mood (grammatical and emotional) returns to the indecisiveness and hazarded possibilities (beyond the smile which itself serves to obscure) of that earlier conditionally-biased phase: ‘And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it, hadn’t it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile’. The somewhat Germanic but typically Jamesian omission of the second ‘if ’ along with the negative pluperfect in inverted and elided form serves in an odd way to lighten and informalize. The studied use of verbs of obligation which follow in the conversation hardly make the uncertainties more concrete. Brydon denies the creature is himself and she reassures him: ‘“it’s not you! Of course it wasn’t to have been.”’ But he wavers and regrets the lost opportunity: ‘“I was to have known myself ”’, he concludes (CT, vol. XII, p. 230). For all the tale’s lapsing at the end into an apparent future of companionable marriage, Miss Staverton embodies some of that genteel power of Mrs Newsome in The Ambassadors, another American matron who has directed so much of Lambert Strether’s life, even when in Europe. Brydon’s pursuit of the ‘other’ follows no such decorous route and the language and events of the fantasy disclose a need and desire for that powerful masculine alternative self which in its urgency suggests a parallel with James’s own interior life in a period when he consciously confronted the native sites of his formative youth. After a minor triumph in putting right a builder who is renovating his other property, Miss Staverton points out a ‘real gift’ which he neglected in leaving: he might have entered the great American competition for wealth and affluence by anticipating ‘the inventor of the sky-scraper’ or starting ‘some new variety of awful architectural hare’ – he might have been a part of that generation who created the urban landscapes which both disturbed and fascinated James. Filled with ‘wanton wonderment’, he appears ‘thrilled and flushed’ at the thought. In this speculation she has initiated the possibility of the ‘other’, an adult male inhabiting the house of his childhood. He is as excited as if he had ‘been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 197–8). The proposition with its expression of erotic danger is reminiscent of anonymous and romantic encounters touched on in James’s letters and some of the essays of Italian Hours.17

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The narrative patronizingly distances itself from this fantasy as Brydon goes on further to refine and detail his imagined pleasure in coming upon a male stranger: ‘The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn’t rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk’ (CT, vol. XI, p. 198). Just as The American Scene had drawn attention to its own technical strategies, the self-referential evaluation of the ‘quaint analogy’ and its disturbing of the text’s integrity, illustrates once more how the narrative favours this charting of language features. Brydon is permitted to grasp his opportunity and excite himself even further at the imagined prospect by ‘improving’ the analogy and developing the fantasy. Thus by this ‘analogy’ the supernatural is prepared for and will, in retrospect, be subsumed within the near-fatal confrontation at the end. It anticipates too the coming alternations of power between the human and the spectral. Brydon may have surprised the stranger in a room ‘shuttered’ in accord with his taste, but that stranger is central and established, ‘planted in the middle’, ‘confronting’, virile and full frontal, ‘facing’ him and ‘erect’. The ‘loquacious’ Irish woman, Mrs Muldoon, wonders innocently about the empty rooms of Brydon’s house, introducing a Gothic horror by evoking ‘a gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms … with her glimmering taper’. Brydon’s actions have been more practical, though they endorse that superstitious fancy by enacting it. He has already rambled nocturnally through the house and avoids being questioned on the matter. He has started creeping (or ‘craping’, as she would say) and has secreted candles at the back of a drawer for the purpose. She has spent her time ‘pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 199) and avoiding being there after nightfall, in contrast to Brydon who in a gesture of Freudian symbolism seals the house when darkness comes (his favourite hours are between eleven and two in the morning), but leaves all the interior doors open. In company, in Miss Staverton’s refined sitting-room with ‘the dear little old objects on her chimney-piece’, Brydon remains frustrated at his failure to know his alternative lost self. He feels a ‘small rage of curiosity’, an intensity of feeling, comparable to the moment when he ‘risked’ a ‘gathered’ answer to his friend, which denotes a disproportionate level of frustration. He likens it to burning ‘some important letter unopened’ (an act familiar from some of James’s earlier fiction), then retracts lest she thinks it a ‘trifle’. The desire to return to his condition of thirty years before – the most far-reaching, if impossible act of revision – ‘positively aches’ within him (CT, vol. XII, pp. 203–4). Brydon raises a crucial condition of James’s own life, his relentless capacity for revision, his inability

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to settle for a specific point of reliable consolidation in terms of text, and his controlling impulse for editing what is to be made available in his own life – the assumed right to reshape any letters for publication, the continued insistence that his own should be burnt by their recipients.18 Brydon self-consciously dismisses the comparison he has introduced: ‘“It’s only a figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel”’, but after the calculated evasions of the opening, this figurative register is precise and concrete. Success might have meant that he become ‘“one of these types who have been hammered so hard and made so keen by their conditions”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 204) – punished, beaten, indomitable and sharp by dint of enterprise. Their only ‘charm’ is that of the ‘rank money-passion’; his interest lies in ‘what fantastic, yet perfectly possible development’ of his own ‘nature’ might have occurred. At twenty-three he was not to know what was for the best and set off for Europe. ‘“It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him for once and for ever”’. Had the flower grown, Miss Staverton thinks, ‘“it would have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous”’. He picks up ‘monstrous’ and adds ‘quite hideous and offensive’, but she dismisses that, telling him he would have had ‘power’: ‘“You’d have liked me that way?”’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 204–5) he asks, and the image suggests a fascination with the sexual symbolism of this male potentiality for growth. The figure he pursues holds an associated erotic fascination.19 Brydon begins to develop a divided life, sustaining an illusion of social function at his club and hotel, responding to ‘this popping of their corks’ with ‘some game of ombres chinoises’, whilst returning to his secret and solitary nocturnal pursuit, ‘the waiting life’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 208). Miss Staverton’s admission that she dreams of ‘“him”’ initiates a deeper pleasure in this illicit preoccupation: ‘It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of a cultivated charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the particular form of surrender to his obsession and of address to what he more and more believed to be his privilege’. ‘With his glimmering light’ he rejoices ‘in open vistas … the long straight chance or show, as he would have called it’. Sure that he was alone, ‘he let himself go’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 207), those words recalling James’s own private resolution, the ‘formula’ of his ‘salvation’ for a viable future years earlier.20 In this freedom of surrender which Brydon accedes to in the isolated, unspeaking night scenes, though his own other is imagined as waiting for him, it is the house’s embodiment of the family past that greets him. He registers the click of the house door behind him ‘as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor’s wand’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 208). He doesn’t hear but ‘always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares …’; the sound summons those early days before

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he had turned away from his American future, suggesting ‘the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where? – in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe, abandoned it’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 209). His momentary regression is marked by this mannered story-telling register which unites place, time and situation with his younger self; even the figurative bell, with its coyly fairy-tale-like invitation, offers a chance to guess; it is ‘hung who should say where?’ And the archaic alternatives of ‘weal or woe’ themselves invoke a more innocent period. Having heard this music, Brydon lays down his stick and in the silence hears another music which continues to play the past; in figurative form its connotations are precious and fragile, as it reminds him of opportunities now lost. The medium of this music is beyond the auditory, embracing the senses and set into movement by some intangibly giant agency. He feels ‘the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 209). Contained within this quietly ringing crystal bowl whose voice recalls the mystery and negations of choices made long ago, Brydon seems lost within image built on image, held within the figurative density of Jamesian style, just as James found himself unequal, or lacking the key, to the meaning of the American urban landscape on his own return. Brydon’s lost opportunities are ghostly presences which he thinks he has woken; they are shy but not sinister and this is the ‘essence of his vision’ which we are given (merely rhetorical) permission to dismiss as ‘all rank folly’. Like an Edwardian socialite in some balletic routine, he hunts them on ‘the points of his evening-shoes’, as if anticipating the elegance of the alter ego he finally meets. He knows he walks and wants to waylay him: a conviction as simple as the comic simile: this ‘was as clear as the figure on a cheque presented in demand for cash’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 209). In all of James’s twentieth-century meditations on the past, whether in his exploration of the American scene or of his earliest New England days, the people he recalls affectionately or with anguished diffidence, even the moods or situations, are collectively nominated as ghosts, sometimes friendly, at other times fearful and unhappy to be disturbed. ‘The Jolly Corner’ as a fictional re-enactment of his return, with its emphatically supernatural medium, left James free to explore the deeper compulsions and desires aroused by the urban environment which, in the New York episodes of The American Scene, already reveal a high level of erotic commitment. Brydon’s explorations of his large four-storey house, his progressions up and down stairs under cover of darkness, spell out a psycho-

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sexual identity in the frankest way. It can be assumed that James was informed on developments in what his brother William called ‘the science of the mind’, especially if one recalls that ‘representative of the new psychology’, Dr Hugh, who in that earlier story, ‘The Middle Years’, enchants the ageing, invalid writer whose work he admires (CT, vol. IX, p. 62). The markedly Freudian aspects of ‘The Jolly Corner’ are evident even in the story’s central activity. In 1900, eight years before ‘The Jolly Corner’ appeared, Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams and would later include data from Otto Rank who in ‘A Staircase Dream’ (1911) suggested that ‘one of the reasons for the use of going upstairs as a sexual symbol is the rhythmical character of both activities: for the dreamer expressly stated that the most clearly defined element in the whole dream was the rhythm of the sexual act and its up and down motion’.21 Whatever misgivings this suggested correspondence may prompt (not least in its mechanistic view of a ‘sexual act’), it offers a parallel for the uncannily dark obsessiveness of Brydon’s nocturnal ascents and descents. At this stage of his pursuit Brydon is in control, enjoying the tension of a hunt for a fearful ghost. This is another ‘quaint analogy’ he introduces, registered with the self-consciousness of an author. ‘The terms, the comparisons, the very practices of the chase positively came again into play; there were even moments when passages of his occasional experience as a sportsman, stirred memories … by the tremendous force of analogy’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 210). And the writerly nature of his consciousness continues to favour elaboration in the manner of Henry James. He is reminded of ‘gentlemen on Bengal tiger-shoots or in close quarters with the great bear of the Rockies’. Always ‘effacing’ himself, he lurks in embrasures, behind doors: ‘he found himself holding his breath and living in the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game alone’. He comically imagines that his scaring of ghosts has made him ‘in the apparitional world an incalculable terror’. His eyes adjust: he can ‘penetrate’ the darkness, marvellously restoring to ‘innocence the treacheries of uncertain light’. Persistently conscious of himself, of his language and his appearance, Brydon imagines, as if he is playing a childhood game once more, his own capacity to shock, ‘like some monstrous stealthy cat’ ‘with large shining yellow eyes’ and what the effect might be if he came upon ‘the poor hard-pressed alter ego’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 210–11).22 Within this semi-playful evolved ritual which includes acting out dares, he likes the window shutters to be open, with ‘the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars’ and the light of streetlamps. He transforms the rear of the house with its smaller rooms and corners into ‘the very jungle of his prey’. With an artist’s detachment he imagines he might look like ‘some solemn simpleton playing at hide-and-seek’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 212). After a three-day break Brydon senses a dynamic shift of power, the presence is no longer ‘falling back’ and he has now become the pursued. Turning round to check there is no one there, he regards

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himself, bookishly, as part of a slapstick commedia dell’arte scene: ‘Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from behind by ubiquitous Harlequin’. Brydon may be less old and foolish than Pantaloon, but the alter ego is just as invisible and mute as Harlequin. The other self has finally ‘turned’ at the top of the house, angrily cornered in some woodland horror myth, ‘the fanged or the antlered animal brought at last to bay’. Brydon’s intuition that his ‘other’ will ‘fight’ has been ‘determined by an influence beyond my notation’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 213), as if language can sometimes fail, or fail to come within range of rarefied or specialized experience. Brydon hubristically congratulates himself on the heroism of his other self: ‘this ineffable identity was thus in the last resort not unworthy of him’. Even in prospect of the unknown horror, the narrative cannot resist alluding to an appropriate proverb: ‘It bristled there … as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle’. The battle is within himself, triumphing in inspiring fear, but ‘quaking for the form in which he might passively know it’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 214). In a momentary ‘lapse of certain instants of concentrated conscious combat’ he feels himself ‘slipping and slipping on some awful incline’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 214). When he opens his eyes everything seems ‘extraordinarily’ lighter, almost like daylight and he realizes that he has ‘stiffened his will against going’. Though the narrative affirms that, ‘Here he was – still at the top’, there has been no indication of Brydon’s ascent to the fourth floor – he most recently had his foot on the bottom step of the staircase. It seems strange that in a text which so rigorously scrutinizes its own medium and itemizes the causes of horror with a Conradian intensity,23 the simpler recording of events should have been neglected. Brydon has maintained his ‘dignities’ (curiously plural and concrete) which he can carry ‘aloft’; he has a ‘physical image, an image almost worthy of an age of greater romance’ and he is himself alert to these elevated analogies; ‘that remark indeed glimmered for him’. He imagines, as if he inhabits that ‘heroic time’, a sudden, swashbuckling descent ‘brandishing’ these dignities and with ‘a drawn sword in his other grasp’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 215–16). During this top-floor horror scene with a distant door which he had left ‘indubitably open!’ now closed – ‘he took it full in the face’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 217), – Brydon’s own manhood is threatened. Has he the courage to act? The blank door vulgarly challenges him: ‘Show us how much you have!’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 218). Declining, after this dubious invitation, an active or spontaneous response, and thus assigning himself a conventionally more feminized role, he thinks rather than acts as he recognizes ‘the value of Discretion’ (with the capitalized ‘d’ perhaps signifying a hint of cowardice). Discretion is the virtue formerly ascribed to Miss Staverton in her wise passivity. His inaction has ‘saved the situation’ and he reads its message: ‘Shut up there, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of the thing palpably proveably done, thus giving notice like some stark

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signboard’. Before the final confrontation with horror Brydon pauses to give a theatrical valediction in this private drama, lit by one of the candles secreted in the kitchen drawer, as he declaims, ‘“I spare you and I give up”’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 218–19). Given the established chivalric allusions and the signalled literariness of the text, it is fitting that his capitulation, with its hinted ironies, discarded second thoughts, making the best of unhappiness, should parody sentiments to be found in an Elizabethan love sonnet: ‘You affect me as by the appeal positively for pity: you convince me that for reasons rigid and sublime – what do I know? – we both of us should have suffered. I respect them then, and, though moved and privileged as, I believe, it has never been given to man, I retire, I renounce – never, on my honour, to try again. So rest for ever – and let me!’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 219).

Before descending, Brydon breaks his pattern of behaviour by opening a window and looking out. His has been an illicit quest, suggesting a form of social deviance which he would have preferred not to draw to the attention of the police. Now ‘he would have welcomed positively the slow approach of his friend the policeman, whom he had hitherto only sought to avoid’. But the street, like the hostile streets of New York in The American Scene, offers no ‘comforting common fact’: ‘Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit?’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 220–1). The only humanizing influence in this ‘generally dishonoured and disfigured’ setting derives from memory, with no real place in the present, some vulnerable relic needing protection, reflecting what James might see as his own obsolete and fragile status: ‘here and there an old association seemed to stray, all vaguely, like some very aged person, out too late, whom you might meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe restoration to shelter’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 198). Brydon’s descent will lead him to a final horror. He hangs back from ‘really seeing’ whether the closed door is now once more open: if ‘he should see the door open, it would all too abjectly be the end of him’, and he would jump from a window, ‘uncontrollably, insanely, fatally’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 221–2). Comforted by his own footsteps in the darkness he passes into a symbolic region where the domestic is transformed into a catalogue of places and situations which have strong associations with Freud’s analysis of dreams and the unconscious: ‘the open rooms … gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the skylight that formed the crown of the deep well created for him a medium in which he could advance, but which might have been, for queerness of colour, some watery under-world’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 222–3). This returns to the symbolism for Miles’s confusion in The Turn of the Screw at being asked what his misdemeanour had been that required his expulsion from school. He looks and

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draws his breath two or three times: ‘He might have been standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some faint green twilight’ (CT, vol. X, p. 135). Such marine submersion (Miles confesses, ‘“Well – I said things”’) might represent the unspoken or unspeakable, at any rate, something deviant requiring removal from society. Brydon reaches the first floor, ‘the bottom of the sea, which showed an illumination of its own and which he even saw paved – when at a given moment he drew up to sink a long look over the banisters – with the marble squares of his childhood’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 223). Looking over the banisters, like seeing himself as a naïve ‘simpleton’ at hide-and-seek, reduces Brydon to a childlike and dependent condition. The marble paving has become a part of that projected seascape, but fixed too to his youth and his aesthetic formation, associated with a Jamesian code for sexual orientation, as Eric Savoy has suggested, when, with this acquisition of ‘style’, he left home on his ‘“perverse young course”’, ‘“almost in the teeth”’ of his father’s curse (CT, vol. XII, p. 204).24 He is reassured by ‘the sight of the old black-and-white slabs’, sensing ‘the element of impunity pulling him as by hard firm hands’. Continuing this reversion to a region identified with childhood he is thus temporarily saved in a gesture suggesting a return to an infantile deferment of responsibility to a disciplining nursemaid and the ‘closed door, blessedly remote now’ remains closed. ‘The case was settled for what he might have seen’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 223), and the language is plainly, reassuringly legalistic. With more than relief, the ‘sharpness of the thrill of assured escape’, he once again closes his eyes only to open them to further horror: the front doors are thrown open, first intimated by a sense of changed light in the hall. His eyes, not for the first time, ‘half-start from his head’ – ‘wasn’t he now in most immediate presence of some inconceivable occult activity?’ He watches ‘the thin admitted dawn’, seeming ‘to play a little as he looked – to shift and expand and contract’. The moment for intimate consummation has arrived: ‘here was at last something to meet, to touch, to take, to know’. He must advance: ‘the condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat’, without any recourse to Discretion. ‘The penumbra, dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in it as still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored sentinel guarding a treasure’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 223–4).25 The figure from that earlier invoked field of chivalric horror clarifies itself into something belonging to him, that he has longed for, ‘taking the very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his curiosity had yearned’. He is not disappointed and it amply fulfils his desire; ‘it gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence’, in those cumulative phrases which lumber, Gerard Manley Hopkins-like, towards definition. The figure is forbidding, contradictory, yet recognizable, ‘rigid and conscious,

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spectral yet human’, ‘a man of his own substance and stature’. His hands are before his face, ‘buried as for dark deprecation’ and at odds with his triumphant-seeming rectitude. In this ‘higher light, hard and acute’ he appears affluent, dapper, yet abject and defeated. Brydon ‘takes him in’ – ‘his vivid truth … his queer actuality of evening-dress’. The elegance is unexpected, though it mirrors Brydon’s own appearance as he had himself hunted ghostly figures ‘on the points of his evening-shoes’. In his still theatricality he could be the subject of a John Singer Sargent painting, as the narrative concedes: ‘No portrait by a great modern master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with more art, as if there had been “treatment”, of the consummate sort, in his every shade and salience’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 224–5). Repulsed by ‘his adversary’s inscrutable manoeuvre’, Brydon is overwhelmed by the threat of his other’s success. He, ‘standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn’t be faced in his triumph’. Yet one of the spread hands of this formidable figure is mutilated and ‘had lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as if accidentally shot away’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 225). The significance of this precise detail remains unresolved,26 though Leon Edel suggests that this confrontation with his other, but maimed, American self indicates James’s own creativity (or the means of realizing it): ‘If he had stayed at home he would have not had the fingers with which to hold his pen’.27 The idea is persuasive, though it discounts the stimulation of America, or ‘home’, in these later years; in addition, James had, more literally, by this stage of his career forgone the hand and the pen, his spoken words immediately translated into text by an amanuensis. The only other moment of American violence within James’s experience which could easily include injuries to body parts was the Civil War. The ‘other’ might be a veteran carrying the ennobling insignia of battle which James had failed to acquire. The head raises itself, the hands fall and Brydon is horrified: ‘the bared identity was too hideous as his’. He looks away ‘in dismay and denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity … He had been “sold”, he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this.’ After those weeks of devoted anticipation, the horror lies in that sameness and otherness – ‘The face was the face of a stranger’ – an encounter with the self in the kind of horror depicted in a series of Dante Gabriel Rossetti paintings. It approaches him, a horrifyingly grotesque figure of entertainment from the nursery, ‘quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood’. Whatever Brydon’s flawed state, it is preferable to this unimagined horror. In the face of such aggression and vulgarity, he succumbs, ‘falling back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 225–6).28 Once more Freudian theory offers a perspective, both individual and archetypal, on the incalculable and uncanny nature of the double.

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Paraphrasing the ideas of Otto Rank, Freud describes it as ‘an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an “energetic denial of the power of death”’, even acting to criticize or censor the mind, before he admits to puzzlement before the human fear it inspires. It dates back ‘to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted – a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The “double” has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned demons.’29 When Brydon revives, Miss Staverton has restored him to life, with echoes of the New Testament. The alter ego has come to her in a dream and ‘“Then I knew it for a sign”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 230), she tells him. ‘“You brought me literally to life”’, he asserts earlier. ‘He felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all this beatitude somehow answered everything’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 228). The resolution is richly ambivalent, Miss Staverton both kindly yet omnisciently placatory. Her early morning dream has revealed the truth to her; she has seen the other and taken this to mean that he had come to Brydon. Yet he remains obtuse, as if in his male insecurity unable to approach her breadth of sympathy. He corrects her – ‘“He didn’t come to me”’ – to which she responds, both yielding and gently punning, yet persistent and smiling beautifully, ‘“You came to yourself ”’ which he then develops one step further, ‘“Ah, I’ve come to myself now”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 231). Brydon denies that the other, ‘“this brute, with his awful face”’, is himself.30 She gently confirms that it is him. ‘She kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility. “Isn’t the whole point that you’d have been different?”’ He has told her, or ‘seemed’ to, that Brydon ‘somehow’ wanted her – ‘“So why shouldn’t I like him?” … “I could have liked him … to me … he was no horror. I had accepted him … it may have pleased him that I pitied him … He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged.”’ His ‘great convex pince-nez’ is ‘for his poor ruined sight’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 231–2). Miss Staverton – with all the ambiguous latitude of motives ranging from love to murderous neurosis which characterizes the narrative of the governess in The Turn of the Screw – remains in the physical and emotional ascendant to offer him a longed-for respite. His successful, native ‘other’ may have ‘“a million a year”’, but ‘“he hasn’t you”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 232), he tells her. The powerful mystery of Brydon’s psychosexual journey to ‘the uttermost end of an interminable grey passage’ is replaced by the ‘golden glow of a late autumn afternoon’ and a final physical embrace, a falling into the waiting arms of hetero- and socio-normality which finds Brydon ‘abysmally passive’. Miss Staverton cradles his head in her lap; he lies prone on ‘his old black-and-white tiles’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 227), a reminder of childhood and the surrender, once more, of responsibility. The tangible reality of death has not been entirely superseded, however; the protagonist had temporarily died and the long grey passage remains.

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With its discursive parallel commentary on linguistic features and working methods, its self-consciousness concerning cliché and proverbial wisdom, its toying with suggestive double entendre, admissions of language’s occasional failures of notation, the text itself proclaims that this is a literary piece, the product of the man of letters, a job-description around which James circles, not uncritically, in his late works. It re-enacts too the sense of shock caused by twentieth-century America and recorded in The American Scene. The ‘other’ has become the product of its American heritage, and the ugly acquisitive values of business (though Brydon himself is profiting happily from the occupancies of his second New York house, now an apartment block). However horrific, he belongs to the orthodox majority, enjoying a powerful normativity unavailable to Brydon and his aesthetic tastes with forbidding connotations of sexual deviance as one who has ‘“followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods”’. The quest takes place without society’s endorsement; the hero prowls at night, hoping no passing policeman will disturb him, checking that everything remains in place as the cleaning woman left it. There can be no easy equating of Brydon with the biographical Henry James, but the horrors of the tale, suggesting unresolved psychosexual anxiety, offer an alternative, fictionalized drama of difference and displacement which quite frequently besets the narrator of The American Scene when he becomes troubled at a level beyond the observations of his more orthodox designation as ‘restless analyst’.

10 OPENING DOORS INTO THE SENSE OF THE PAST

In his ‘Statement’ for The Sense of the Past (the extended notes he habitually made in planning a novel) James observed its common origins with ‘The Jolly Corner’,1 and, indeed the novel in its initial premise was to have been a young man’s confrontation with his own historic self, a transatlantic and more youthful remodelling of the short story. Both works dramatize, too, the ambiguities of identity, as if the novelist now scans his life, considering alternatives which might have forged (to recall a trope from ‘The Jolly Corner’) a different, almost unimaginable self. This is the material and motivation (as Jerome Bruner reminds us) of the most informal acts of retrospection when the probings of conscious memory can allow access to unlived, illicit and even intoxicating possibilities – the stuff, in James’s hands, of a ghost story. That genre allows for the freest treatment of psychic material and for touching on recognized anomalies and disorders of the spirit. The hints and notes for the theme of an unknown self appear in James’s papers from 1900 onwards – when he was roughly Brydon’s age in the short story. They touch on American figures, and contain disquieting associations of fear and unhappiness. The self-referential context of ‘The Jolly Corner’ is commonly acknowledged, but The Sense of the Past, in its broader, more fantastical, less nightmarish consideration of alternative selves, introduces much wider, socially-based questions in their bearing on the self. Scenes in which men expose their vulnerability or exchange mutual feelings, however commonplace or orthodox the ostensible subject, propose a relationship, urbanely, easily, even comically executed, of homoerotic intensity which challenges contemporary mores and reveals the level of James’s confidence.2 Percy Lubbock, one of James’s young friends, who published the novel after his death, suggests that, in the early years of the war, he felt able to work on this novel (having given up on The Ivory Tower), because he regarded it as ‘a story of remote and phantasmal life’ (SP, p. v). The novel is indeed a fantasy of time-travel, but in that freedom offered in moving between epochs and having a contemporary protagonist meet himself in the previous century, James evidently felt able to explore the pleasures of homosocial contact, as if, to adapt – 156 –

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the title of the hero’s brilliant essay mentioned in the text, he is there reading his own history. Many of his earlier days had been spent, of course, in late-Victorian London, with the Cleveland Street affair and the Oscar Wilde trials of the nineties notorious at the time and much documented since.3 It is unsurprising, then, that despite clear evidence within the fiction of James’s attunement to a range of masculine behaviours and an expressed sensitivity to the physicality, even the vulnerability of men, scenes of male intimacy are rehearsed against a hostile environment which threatens exposure and social or personal disgrace. A provisional and early version of the idea for The Sense of the Past – a young American arriving in England to claim an historic property – was published with ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’ as early as 1871. Much later, in August 1900, James records a more disquieting vision, of ‘3 or 4 “scared” and slightly modern American figures … hurried by their fate … in search of, in flight from, something or other’ (CN, pp. 190–1). The experience occurred on a return train journey from Brighton to London and what he imagined is more mysterious and disturbing. The generalities sketched out in his notebook and the range of European locations are honed down and intensified in the surviving fragment of the novel. A young American, Ralph Pendrel, whose offer of marriage to a New York widow is turned down, arrives in London to take possession of a nineteenth-century London townhouse, the posthumous reward from an unknown kinsman for his impressive ‘Essay in Aid of the Reading of History’. He looks round the house and, after one obsessive, nocturnal exploration realizes that the figure he has noticed carrying a candle is not a reflection but his own alter ego who has emerged from a puzzling, rear-view portrait of a young man. He reveals his experience to a friendly American ambassador, returns to the house, and steps into the 1820s, thus exchanging places with his other self. His new role means he is on familiar terms with the Midmore family, and is betrothed to its eldest daughter, though finding himself increasingly drawn to her sister. With his intact twentieth-century sensibility and intelligence (and good teeth), he feels he is regarded with a degree of suspicion and, in encounters with the girls’ brother and an aristocrat who wishes to marry the younger sister, recognizes his ‘malaise’ and a longing for his own century. At this stage where the ‘reading of history’ has initiated ironic and unsuspected complications, the fragment ends. With its demands on the mechanics of a ghostly narrative and the need for what James refers to as foreshortening, the novel’s relations both with The Turn of the Screw and ‘The Jolly Corner’ are clear. The comparative simplicity of motive and conflict in ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’ has given way to irresolution, to questions and uncertainties related to the self and one’s accumulated identity, to horrors which can be self-generated as well as attaching to what might be considered the banalities of destiny and the unanswerable imperatives of time. The nightmare vision of those two opposing alternatives, pursuit and flight, on

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the train returning to London, recurs in James’s recorded impressions of psychic unease, exemplified, of course, in the dream of the Galerie d’Apollon. The menacing stairs, rooms and passageways of ‘The Jolly Corner’ are revisited in the nocturnal prowlings of The Sense of the Past. James felt there was more to be done with such material, ‘the very centre of my subject’, which he has (with a selfdeprecating allusion to the cut-prices of the market place) ‘a bit discounted in the stuff of the Jolly Corner’.4 The powerful reversal by which passivity is roused to an active role, fearfulness can become fear-inspiring, and stillness and silence assert themselves, is defined in the familiar gesture of ‘turning the tables’, a phrase used by James in ‘The Jolly Corner’ and in the dream of the Galerie d’Apollon, to denote the moment when the appalled becomes the appalling.5 A highly developed, indeed professional sense of the past and a susceptibility to the romantic blandishments of objects which themselves embody history encourage the hero’s exploration of his newly-claimed home. He recognizes its mystery and otherness, and acknowledges a medium which is beyond ‘notation’, speaking only to intuition and willing self-reflection. The house seems happy to indulge Ralph Pendrel’s openness to, indeed taste for, new and disturbing knowledge. If imagination is, for him, ‘a chain of open doors through which endless connections danced there was yet no knowledge in the world on which one should wish a door closed’ (SP, p. 45). With the novel’s temporal shift into the 1820s he confesses to the Midmore family his surprising accessibility to knowledge and accommodation of the new in quite casual terms: ‘“It’s as if there were a few doors that don’t yield to my push – though we’ve seen most of them fly open, haven’t we? Those I mean have to be opened from within, as you’ve also seen”’ (SP, p. 208). In his original, twentieth-century life, Ralph had acted out this figurative fancy, an exercise sinister and guilt-laden, shunning attention and intent on secret pleasure as ‘he hung about under cover of night’ (SP, p. 50). The house comes alive – ‘the dusky front at these times showed its eyes – admirable manypaned windows’ – but he is a furtive observer, stopping only ‘when the coast was clear for a longer stare’. Indeed the intensity of the pleasure is accentuated by a hint of the illicit: ‘There was still a want of ease in his ecstasy, if it were not rather that the very essence of the ecstasy was a certain depth of apprehension’ (SP, p. 52). He favours a solitary darkness and silence, ‘the force of the stillness in which nothing happened’ (SP, p. 79). In a setting familiar from ‘The Jolly Corner’ he feels drawn into a ‘bottomless abyss of “tone” whenever the high door closed behind him’ to stand ‘with his sharp special thrill’ in the hall ‘paved in alternate squares of white marble and black’ (SP, pp. 61–2). Whatever the deeply private signification of this marble paving for James, the situation offers a pleasure which feeds off guilt and secrecy. The door should close soundlessly and unrevealingly, but on this occasion betrays ‘the slight heaviness that inevitably defeated discretion’. The self-effacing servants

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have found their best means of pleasing; no need for ‘spells and superstitions’: they must simply hold their breath (SP, pp. 62–3). He has stepped outside the boundaries of upper-middle class Edwardian London to feel the excitement of transgression. The American Pendrel has returned not to a place which invites assessment of the past and of the options it held, like Spencer Brydon in the New York of ‘The Jolly Corner’, but to the Old World and his inheritance. After he has ‘mounted the large old stair and begun to pass from room to room’ he gratefully acknowledges his debt to his British relative ‘of a distant cousinship’ (SP, p. 2) who, unknown and now unknowable but who anticipated his ‘ear for stilled voices’ (SP, p. 41), has touchingly allowed him an ‘impression so indefinably prepared by other hands’ (SP, p. 63). The liberating event for the action, the inheritance of a great gift, stipulated even after the ‘bad blood’ of a family quarrel, derives from that same field of fairy-tale transformation which initiates The Ivory Tower. Indeed Mary Garland in Roderick Hudson, many years earlier, had wondered at the young hero’s fairytale good fortune with Rowland Mallet’s ‘“coming here all unknown, so rich and so polite, and carrying off my cousin in a golden cloud”’.6 Like Gray Fielder, Ralph Pendrel is a hero to whom James unconditionally gives everything. In his original projection as an ‘international ghost’, ‘he was to have been wonderful and beautiful’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 150). Marriage is available to Ralph, but the great scenes of physical warmth and understanding occur inevitably between men. At the novel’s opening he calls hopefully on the ‘magnificent’ Aurora Coyne, a young widow he has long known, despite his feeling ‘a delicacy about proposing marriage to a woman supposedly in grief ’ (SP, p. 6). He has undergone ‘the long discipline’ of ‘a choked passion’ for her. She, however, prefers ‘“men of action”’, though she three times repeats James’s own designation, telling him, to his seeming annoyance, that he is ‘“beautiful”’ (SP, pp. 12–13). Her other conditions – that he mustn’t be ‘spoiled’ (SP, p. 18) by going to Europe, and that she could never return there because of an experience that has filled her with ‘rage or shame, leaving behind it a wound or a horror’ (SP, p. 15) – are never developed in the fragment, though they suggest some psychic trauma that Old World civilization can inflict. What Aurora ‘dies’ to see, in terms of men, is ‘the best we can turn out quite by ourselves’, a vision perhaps of untouched, uncorrupted American manhood. Pendrel angrily offers her as an example of the type, the cowboy: ‘“isn’t he what you want, and why isn’t he good enough?”’ (SP, p. 28). He ridicules her ideal, but the allusion may include a private memory for James of his handsome young friend, Owen Wister, and his novels of the West. If the female protagonist can dwell on the beauty of men, and the narrative suggest that construction of home-bred American masculinity, the cowboy, as an alternative to the thinking man, James’s notes (admittedly written as he returned after a gap of fourteen years to the novel) suggest some gender partiality in their

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dismissiveness of women. He refers impatiently to ‘Aurora What’s-her-name’ and to ‘Mrs. So-and-so of Drydown’ (SP, pp. 287–8), the mother of Ralph’s betrothed in the historic section. Even Ralph archly suggests to Perry that his sister Nan, who is unwilling to accept the suit of Sir Cantopher, should be fed ‘bread and water in a moated grange’, casting her off to the morally sinister world of Measure for Measure, or sharing the plight of Tennyson’s Mariana, as if such a vague literary reference will suffice in considering her disquiet. (In the 1820 of this part of the novel’s action, Tennyson’s poem had yet to be written, of course.) At their first romantic meeting, Molly Midmore, the fiancée of his alter ego of the 1820s, appears to Ralph as a decorative art-object. His initial impression as he enters a room, and thus into an unfamiliar narrative, ‘stepping straight into some chapter of some other story – other than his own of that moment’, is of mystery and beauty. He sees ‘the young lady seated near one of the windows before a piece of fine tense canvas framed and mounted on slim wooden legs, through which she was in the act of drawing a long filament of silk with the finest arm in the world raised as high as her head’. The statuesque charm of the unstudied pose belongs to a Pre-Raphaelite portrait, its stillness maintained as she familiarly acknowledges him, as if ‘just balancing herself or wishing not to loosen her stitch’. He notices ‘the crook of her little finger, in the raised hand’ and ‘the arm itself, its sleeve shortened to very near the shoulder … of the most beautiful rounded shape’ (SP, pp. 117–19). As she tells him of the family connections of their past, he assumes a decorous passivity in a figurative baroque scene (though he is the keyboard performer and she the mere page-turner) which James would repeat in The Ivory Tower: ‘He was in actual free use of the whole succession of events, and only wanted these pages, page after page, turned for him: much as if he had been seated at the harpsichord and following out a score while the girl beside him stirred the air to his very cheek as she guided him leaf by leaf ’ (SP, p. 124). Later Ralph, in his condition as man of the twentieth as well as the nineteenth century, has a brief but revelatory vision of Molly and her companions, reduced in his eyes to ‘an artful, a wonderful trio, some mechanic but consummate imitation of ancient life, staring through the vast plate of a museum’ – as if, paradoxically, his ‘care’ for them had ‘converted them to the necessarily void and soundless state’ (SP, pp. 209–10). Ralph further diminishes women’s status as Molly herself is light-heartedly reduced to self-acknowledged ineptitude. Ralph has kept and treasured all her letters and he offers to conspire with her to conceal the excesses of her bad spelling if he repeats them aloud for the family: ‘“I have them by heart with the funny spelling and all; and if our company only hear, without seeing, your sweetest passages, my dear, they won’t know, they won’t know –!”’ She confesses so charmingly in maintaining this conspiracy that he loves her only ‘the more’ (SP, pp. 184–5). Ralph’s amused proprietorship (or patronizing control) casts light

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on some of the motives and dynamics of James’s own dealings with the letters of his relatives and friends, most notoriously Minny Temple’s, which were so cavalierly edited and moulded according to his taste. Ralph’s would be merely a private performance, yet the fictional girl seems more deeply infantilized than any portrayal of early-nineteenth-century gender roles might require. Molly’s brother, Perry, does not write letters of any kind and belongs to a benighted, countrified set familiar from the drama or fiction of Oliver Goldsmith, perhaps. Yet he is one of a sequence of men whose physical idiosyncrasies attract the kind of subtle attentiveness rarely accorded to even the most romanticized women. He ‘gapes’ on his first entrance and will be ‘bold’, ‘brave’ and ‘brutal’. His suit of clothes is uniformly tight as if straining against his ‘daily increase of strength’, the ‘fine bright shine’ of his skin betraying a ‘general tense surface’ (SP, pp. 147–9). Perry has been introduced within what seems some comic but secretive and exclusively male conspiracy in which even Ralph shares. The young footman, who may have announced him (Ralph cannot be sure), is briefly caught in a transgressive gesture, and is even less in control than Perry himself. Ralph ‘was struck at once with his 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’ (SP, p. 147), as if he belongs to some underground, male-only subculture in which social status confers no privilege and has forgotten ‘the place of a servant in the scale’, as the governess, thinking of the relative positions of Miss Jessel and Quint, comments in The Turn of the Screw.7 Perry himself has none of Ralph’s asserted ‘brilliance’, and it is concluded that ‘it wouldn’t be a great affair … to loom large to Perry’. Ralph, intent on not wrong-footing him, ‘smiled and smiled, smiled verily as perhaps never in his life before’ (SP, pp. 149–50) in an effort not to be mistrusted; the extended smile is the most powerful, non-verbal communication in James’s late scenes of rapprochement between men. Such is the power of Ralph’s ‘dilemma’, his foreknowledge that he will be unable to remain ‘unperturbed’ in allaying Perry’s mistrust, that the narrative diverts into an apology, confessing that ‘we shall scarcely be able to do it justice enough’. Ralph had not allowed for the impossibility of dealing with Perry’s ‘wonderments’, a realization that elicits further effusions: ‘we may in fact all but feel his heart even now stand still for half a second under that noted first breath of a fear’. That he ‘wanted but to please and soothe and satisfy him, that he was ready to sacrifice to so doing all but the blood of his veins, this came over him to the point of bringing out sweat-drops on his brow’ (SP, p. 150). The medium for negotiation remains uncompromisingly primitive, reducing human communication to wordless simplicity, illustrating in Perry ‘as neat a case as one could desire of impenetrable density before the unfamiliar’. He is figured as Ralph’s hunted quarry, suspicious and snuffling: ‘Perry scented his cleverness, so to call

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it, scented his very act of understanding, as some creature of the woods might scent the bait of the trapper’ (SP, p. 151). Later, in a gesture designed to reassure Perry, to allay his suspicion, and to share the sad realization that one thought leads perversely to another, Ralph lays a hand on his shoulder, reducing him, again, to a creature reliant on the simplest, aroused reflexes: ‘the other’s queer little glare abated and he stood as stiffly passive as if, whatever this should mean, the least movement might perhaps precipitate some further complication’ (SP, pp. 164–5). The transforming passion of Ralph’s desire simply to placate and gratify the other man outstrips any comparable imagined contact with his betrothed, Molly. Perry moves towards him in a ‘gallantry of welcome’ till Ralph ‘scarce knew what brave distance had been covered by the exchange between them of a fine old fraternal embrace over which Mrs. Midmore’s authority … somehow presided with elegance’. Despite the text’s reminders of the reassuring decorum of the gesture initiated by Perry, its role in advancing their relationship is nevertheless acknowledged. Perry will be curious and simple in ways unknown to Ralph, as he realizes in such intimate, physical proximity; James’s intrusive rhetorical question suggestively locates romantic desire in a site which might seem the converse of erotic: ‘Was it the fact of the embrace, was it the common stout palpability, the very human homely odour, of his relative, that had … dispelled all difficulties and renewed the wonderful rush, as it could only be felt, of the current?’ (SP, p. 153). If, for Perry, it is sufficient that the suitor please both Molly and her mother, Ralph is quick to interrupt and challenge him with a further, flirtatious directness: ‘“To say nothing of my pleasing you, of course”’. Once again James relishes exploring the bonds between men and the freedom to express them within a hetero-normative context. Ralph knows that it is because he is ‘Molly’s husband to be … just arrived from America’ that Perry has been ‘pushed into his arms’ (SP, pp. 158, 155). Ralph praises the wisdom, kindness, and handsomeness of the women of the family, confessing (in suspect hyperbole) his susceptibility to ‘the full ravage of female loveliness’ (SP, p. 164), yet seems reluctantly, perversely, infatuated by the young man, ‘looking at his kinsman ever so much harder and harder – which he somehow found that, though it wasn’t at all what he wanted, he couldn’t in the least help’. Perry has to approve the marriage as well as Ralph’s assumed nineteenth-century identity, a transaction between the men imagined (with admitted disbelief ) as a kind of metaphorical Lawrentian wrestling match. In this imagined physical struggle to find masculine supremacy, Ralph looks at Perry and it ‘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’.

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The struggle is mutual, as James suggests, continuing to detail a homoerotic tableau of reciprocal exchanges and offerings, unusual even for his late fiction. The simplicity of his language allows nevertheless for an ambiguity, a physical nuance to Perry’s acceptance of Ralph as potential brother-in-law: ‘Perry would have to take him, and to show that he had taken him – this was the tug’. Whatever the punning ambiguities of ‘take’, the surreptitious insertion of the final apparent afterthought and the vulgar potential of ‘tug’ (comparable in meaning to what is now the no more innocent, ‘ay, there’s the rub’), the relative positions of the two men demand a form of surrender or self-revelation from each. The more Ralph must reveal, or ‘insist’ on ‘a relation’, however ‘wreathed … in flowers’ his words might be (exposed male flesh garlanded with flowers recalls the paintings of Caravaggio), ‘the more he seemed to give his man an opportunity the other aspect of which was that it was for himself a form of exposure’. The dangers of awakening ‘the dull’, of making this ‘creature’ ‘more penetrable’ require his own preliminary surrender and are extended into areas of deeper potential transgression in ‘violating nature’ within which Ralph feels torn: ‘Why should he be exposed, and what, above all, exposed to, was more than he could have said – wondering as he did at this even while a passion urged and an instinct warned him’. He must resign himself – ‘there it was, in any case’ – and continue his pursuit, however furtively, within the watching conformities of society: ‘he couldn’t help sounding Perry, even in the presence of the women’ (SP, pp. 158–9). Ralph’s gaze which cannot be deflected from Perry is particularly significant since on at least three occasions it is noted that members of the Midmore family avoid eye contact, or the ‘visual account’ (SP, p. 227). Ralph is tacitly inviting him to open his eyes, within the family circle still, to advance from the pleasantness of their relations and testify to ‘the presence of stronger passions’ (SP, p. 190). Having noticed that Perry’s eyes ‘seemed to wish for some restless reason to keep clear’ of his own, he ‘almost caught himself in the act of wondering … whether this member of the family were not appointed to interest him more by a round-about course than the others by the directness which matched his own’ (SP, p. 188). This scarcely admitted, covert observation which restores the young man to the normality of the family is quickly relegated to the past, as if Ralph is in process of bringing him out into some ongoing, more dangerous relation, with potentially comic consequences. Ralph is compelled to admit that ‘Perry was now practising the art of the straight look very much as he might have practised that of balancing his stick on his chin’. The change is emphatically of the present, registering the irony of Perry ‘practising’ sincere looks. The exchange of glances brings with it, nevertheless, the unavoidable complication of communication between the men at an unsettlingly intense level, liberated from conventional male behavioural codes. Ralph feels himself the cause of the ‘difficulty’: ‘wanting himself, and wanting much, to encourage the freedom, he yet troubled it by the

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look returned as a sign of that. Should he have, he asked himself, to shut his eyes so that his cousin might keep his open upon him?’ The deictic ‘that’, must refer, however syntactically awkwardly, to ‘freedom’. The playful options of looking/ not looking might belong to the conventions of fairy-tale or the faux-rationality of Lewis Carroll, and they suggest an erotically-based fascination. But Ralph is far from blind to the dangers of this reciprocal arrangement, and his privately invented drama wanders free from the legitimizing presence of the family circle: ‘“Take me in, take me in, and see how little it will hurt you”, he felt he should have liked to say; but what came back was that just the intention of it defeated somehow as by excess of meaning the act of reassurance’ (SP, p. 189). The idea of a weight of feeling subverting or nullifying the meaning of words spoken to the object of desire is, of course, a commonplace of romantic experience. Ralph’s plaintively imploring inner voice stands in comically sharp contrast to the gruff interchange between the men. Such insights and speculation, typical of the late fiction, reflect the degree to which James is fascinated by aspects of being male, by the atmosphere and nuances of tone in exclusively male interchanges, especially when they are transgenerational, by the signals by which masculinity may be interpreted, and by the potential tenderness of male relationships – behaviours which can both surprise and move the narrative voice. Ralph’s explicitness and openness in matters where the British might be bound by a more mealy-mouthed sense of decorum relates, as the text indicates, to his American background, a late and more gender-inflected variation on James’s international theme. In James’s twentieth-century writing the emphases are redrawn, doubtless reflective of his own return to America and the ensuing shock so frequently associated (for instance, in the events and tropes of The American Scene) with the diversity of male experience. In this novel set predominantly in England, Pendrel’s eccentricity or distinctiveness, his wealth and promise are regarded by the English gentry as a cultural matter – so that any strangeness tends to be attributed to his being American. It is as if James himself having become Europeanized (or perhaps not really nationally definable at all),8 now sees the young American man as an object of complete interest in his own right, as if revising the figure of Roderick Hudson who no longer has a need of European cultural endorsement. In The Sense of the Past, superficially conventional transactions between men – a meeting with a prospective brother-in-law, an exchanged look or a hand on a shoulder, an initial chat between an expatriate and his local ambassador – become expanded musings on how men relate and what they might ‘see’ in each other. At times James even temporarily misleads the reader to wonder at the frankness of expression between men, querying accepted codes whilst moving misapprehension beyond national stereotypes. Perry admits to Ralph that his family does not know what to make of him and, when pressed, refuses to offer more. Yet Ralph persists:

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‘But you like me so’. ‘I like you –?’ Perry rather growled it, but it was as if he wondered. ‘I mean you all do …’. Ralph explained … (SP, pp. 268–9).

In this same scene, when Perry has confessed his shortage of money, Ralph becomes a deus ex machina figure from fairy-tale, carrying quantities of gold coins, spontaneously asking ‘“Will you have some now?”’, clapping his hand to ‘the right pocket of his trousers’. As Ralph excitedly persists in his offer, the scene with its seductive invitation takes on a secretive, sexual urgency, accentuating the tactile and introducing connotations of tumescence and display. Ralph ‘beamed all his renewal of support at Perry on feeling his fingers quite plunge into gold’; ‘“How much will you have?”’ he asks in ‘exquisite agitation’ that the crudeness of handling such amounts must appear to the Midmores too vulgar. His interest ‘grew and grew’; willing to allow such directness to be regarded as part of ‘an American freedom’, ‘if it was one it should be a great one, and Ralph kept this up. “You’ve only to say, you know!”’ Perry continues to gaze ‘with a bovine air as from over a fence and under his brows’ whilst Ralph resorts to ‘superlative soothing’: ‘His personal confidence … had at the first fine touch of his fortune shot straight up, and he rose with it to an extraordinary height … “there’s really no sum you mayn’t name –!” And he chinked and chinked.’ ‘Perry’s breath came shorter and shorter, but he still stood off.’ Ralph goes on to promise more: ‘he so liked his clutch that he drew it forth and held it high, shaking it in the air and laughing’. Perry ‘glared up at the hidden treasure’, but the scene is interrupted as someone noiselessly enters behind Ralph’s back, a fact he registers by the change in Perry’s expression. As if acknowledging transgression, he lowers his fist, restoring it to his pocket, waiting a full minute before ‘facing about’ (SP, pp. 269–71). In his translation to an earlier century, Ralph is identified in the notes James had prepared for the remainder of the incomplete novel as open to suspicion, as unaccountably different, as if he fears he might be hated, as Mrs Midmore gently points out. Regularly in the late fiction, James imagines his young or middleaged male protagonists in situations or relationships which could entail social disgrace or meet with hostility. In such lives which run the risk of exposure James finds ‘a tremendous lot of possibilities’. In their disquiet, the figures of the early nineteenth century in The Sense of the Past will regard Ralph uneasily as ‘abnormal, as uncanny, as not like those they know of their own kind’, while he will try to appear to them ‘almost as right as possible for the “period”, and yet so intimately and secretly wrong’ (SP, p. 289), thus sustaining a masquerade which has all the marks of sexual repression and the fear of exposure. Embarking on this adventure Ralph had stepped into a world clearly divided from the present. He re-entered the Mansfield Square house decisively, as the Ambassador observed,

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but pausing ‘before the closing of the door again placed him on the right side and the whole world as he had known it on the wrong’ (SP, p. 113). It seems like a moment of refuge where he may be his own sexual self, insulated from social stigma. Yet this new ‘world’ Ralph has gained on the ‘right side’ (situated in the Old World and in history) has its own conventions demanding a new form of duplicity, and he must continue to strive to remain unremarkable. Ralph’s initial meeting with his earlier self, achieved after an obsessional prowling around his inherited house ‘in the old London square’,9 forms the climax of the second book, in a fusion of male otherness and sameness, both terrifying, yet ‘a wonder of wonders’ and ‘a miracle prayed for’ (SP, pp. 85–6). The moment of illumination – ‘two o’clock in the morning and terrible weather’, the windows rattling and his candle almost extinguished – belongs to Gothic horror, a genre more pointedly invoked than in the comparable scenes of ‘The Jolly Corner’. The inward-facing portrait he had noticed earlier has ‘turned’ (SP, pp. 84–5), he is ‘prodigiously’ present in the room, ‘the full prodigy was there’ – the unearthly unnaturalness of the presence could not be more accentuated. We are urged to assent to this central ‘riddle’ on which the continuing events depend: ‘The young man above the mantel, the young man brown-haired, pale, erect, with the high-collared dark blue coat, the young man revealed, responsible, conscious, quite shining out of the darkness, presented him with the face he had prayed to reward his vigil’ (SP, p. 86). In contrast with the concealments forced upon Ralph, the moment asserts the mystery of human presence, with its incantatory, triumphant reiteration of the subject, the disclosed face allowing for a reading of character and truth.10 More than elaborately enacting the moment of pleasure for James, the flâneur, when an eye-catching head in the street has turned and lived up to its promise, the revelation takes on a spiritual dimension, the ‘reward’ for his ‘vigil’. The journey into the past and into another self has become a form of personal myth. Leon Edel points out how features of the novel suggest some return to the America of the 1860s and to the ‘Civil War young men James had created’. He goes on to see in the newly-revealed image the face of one of the most important of that group of desired young men, Hendrik Andersen, whom he had entertained at Lamb House, his Sussex home, for three days in the previous summer of 1899. Edel amalgamates the experience, invoking ‘the symbolic language of the mind’, so that Ralph’s vision becomes James’s when he had seen ‘his younger self during the fleeting hours spent with the young sculptor’. Thus the past as opposed to the present, America as against England, formed the potentially tragic themes as James dwelt upon his own life in 1900: ‘Hendrik who now had taken a studio in New York and was attempting to make his way in America, the land of the future, while James watched from the land of the past’ (Life, vol. II, pp. 348–50). Yet it is less bleak than Leon Edel suggests: James will bravely confront and move to assimilate its twentieth-century challenge and will ‘live

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into’ the ‘new truth’ in personal terms which he foresees for Ralph at the end of the novel. The affectionate rapport between youth and age which marks the James– Andersen relationship is dramatized in the scene when the American ambassador (a figure modelled on James Russell Lowell11) busies himself during Ralph’s visit with the ritual of lighting a cigar and the placing of a ‘reassuring hand’ (SP, p. 94) on his guest’s shoulder. ‘“I’m at the worst … one of the quiet kind”’ Ralph confides to ‘his Excellency’, ‘“for I’m sure you see all sorts”’ (SP, p. 93), hinting at a series of comparable exchanges amongst a range of types. After a mutual pledge of confidentiality, Ralph takes as a challenge the other man’s impression of his ‘“general reserve”’ and finds (or, rather, ‘it afterwards appeared’) that ‘he had also taken the Ambassador’s left hand, removing it by his own right from his shoulder, where it had remained in soothing and, he was sure, rather compassionate intent’. The Ambassador replies to Ralph’s admission that ‘“I’m not myself ”’ with a reassuring ‘“Oh yes you are!”’; Ralph, after a further amplification for politeness’ sake, offers an unambiguous corollary to his initial statement, ‘“I’m somebody else”’. During the sustained comic ironies of this verbal and physical interchange Ralph is aware that the other’s hand ‘still submitted to his own for reassurance’ (SP, p. 95), before eventually becoming disengaged. The interview continues to free itself from conventional male behaviours by developing an intimate, even coy level of mutual awareness. Aware that the Ambassador may be ‘humouring’ him, Ralph requests his patience and that he ‘“be very kind”’ (SP, p. 96). He explains that he is what his alter ego was, they are separated only by the periods in which they live, he is his other’s future which is the Ambassador’s present. Their conversation introduces variants on the novel’s title as the young man of the past is cherished as cultivating, not ‘a sense of the present’, as the Ambassador suggests, but a ‘sense of the future’ (SP, p. 101). ‘“I’m not worse looking, even if I’m not better”’, Ralph exclaims, to which his companion ‘handsomely’ replies, ‘“You couldn’t very well be better!”’ (SP, pp. 97–8). But Ralph is too absorbed to notice the compliment, relieved that he and his alter ego are American and not British. His ‘other’ was that night ‘“in a perfect prime that it was a joy, as a fellow-countryman, to behold”’, and Ralph seems unguardedly infatuated: ‘“He’s magnificent. He’s really beautiful”’ (SP, p. 99). His enthusiasm is matched by the Ambassador’s as he remarks on Ralph’s standing there ‘“delightfully before me”’ (SP, p. 104). In one of his last essays written in the autumn of 1915 when work on the novel had come to a halt forever (the notes were last touched at the end of 191412) James in unbridled mood and with the romantic candour of his old age expresses a similar admiration for young manhood, casting the ‘young, happy, extraordinarily endowed and irresistibly attaching’ Rupert Brooke in a comparable homoerotic, idealizing light. Like ‘a stripped young swimmer … splashing

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through blue water’, he ‘expressed us all’; ‘one liked absolutely everything about him, without the smallest exception’; he ornamented a setting as beautiful as the Cambridge ‘Backs’, and even on his visit to New York, to see him in his ‘readiest rightness … we should always have liked to be there’.13 Such figures belong not to the realistic but the romantic mode as James characterizes it in his Preface to the New York Edition of The American; they exist with ‘the things that, with all the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all the courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we never can directly know; the things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire’.14 The sensibility which finds such inspiration in the male body and male experience can extend, in the novel, into a camp mode which even queries conventional gender distinctions. The voice of Sir Cantopher Bland, suitor to the Midmore family’s youngest child, Nan, takes its place under ‘the reign of the nasal’, and goes ‘up, up, up’ to a ‘queer fine squeak’, so that, before seeing him, ‘you might have turned to expect some rather ancient lady … playing her part … upon an organ cracked beyond repair’ (SP, p. 222). With the gesture of what might be a pantomime dame (a dramatized configuration of gender for a knowing and collaborative audience), Sir Cantopher, on his entry, figuratively waves back the Midmore family while sketching ‘a hundred like possibilities upon the stretched expanse of Ralph’s vision, which might have been an artist’s uppermost fair sheet’. James continues the high camp mood with further comic wordplay: while the others turn away their heads, Ralph must ‘keep his own’ (SP, p. 229). Sir Cantopher spontaneously detects in Ralph ‘a natural taste’, a faculty to be wondered at: ‘“I seem to see it grow in your very face while I speak to you: which is as becoming to you as possible and as promising, mayn’t I say? for my own opportunity.”’ Under such frank attentiveness and gallantry Ralph becomes, once again, the object of another male’s gaze. With sharp intuition Sir Cantopher has immediately seen where Ralph, deep within, initiates his ‘perceptions and possibilities’, and he has caught them ‘crude’ before they are ‘served up’. Ralph’s privacy has been breached and Sir Cantopher ‘had put his fine finger so straight upon the spot where our young man’s consciousness then most throbbed’. Under this ‘liveliest observation’ and exposure of himself, Ralph blushes for some time, his countenance giving ‘such increased signs as made his critic the more frankly appreciate them’.15 Sir Cantopher, the ‘terrible man’, invites the others in his outrageousness ‘to admire their kinsman’s expression’. Under such scrutiny and flattery, Ralph’s vulnerability as well as his growing distance from contemporary norms of masculinity are compromisingly highlighted by a sudden access of emotion: he feels tears welling, expressive both of his joy at such a tribute and shame at being ‘so held up for transparent’. To complete the setting aside of orthodox male behaviours and to assert too, perhaps, his affectionate proprietorship over the young man, Sir Cantopher seems to continue (Ralph, by now

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panting a little, can see only through a ‘blur of tears’) to invite the family to look at him ‘in the light of that damning charm’ (SP, pp. 230–2). The extended scene continues to display Ralph with all his virtues as both Sir Cantopher and the Mildmore family compete in admiring him. Molly, his betrothed, speaks hyperbolically of his ‘“wonder”’: ‘“I want to show you off … and yet I seem at the same time to want you not to be touched”’. Sir Cantopher shares this estimate of Ralph’s value and develops the ‘figure’ to make him the most precious and fragile of objects: ‘“You’re very fine porcelain indeed … but, for myself, I shall like, as you’ll see, the sense of handling you with care”’ (SP, p. 256). Ralph, generous with his gifts, reassures him that ‘“there’s plenty of me for you all if you’d only believe it and let me see each of you enjoy it!”’, transforming himself into a consumable, an object of desire more commonly associated with women in a male-empowered culture. Unlike Molly, Sir Cantopher prefers to be selfish and keep others away, to touch and handle him ‘“as wisely as wonders should only be handled”’ (SP, p. 257). He will never tire of his treasures and assures Molly that ‘“far from wanting him to live only for me”’ he will even show increased (if seemingly insulting) interest in her, to see ‘“how he supports your wear and tear”’ (SP, p. 258). The language of the extended notes James had prepared, sketching out the possibilities lying ahead and the means of treating them (themes to be caught ‘by the tip of the tail’,16 made accessible by ‘patiently firm, direct pressure’ or by ‘squeezing’, or ‘handling’ (SP, pp. 305, 318, 309)) betrays once more the tactile and potentially trangressive nature of his relations with the material, a reflection of the subversive behaviours which he is dramatizing. The novel’s young male protagonist is compelled to keep his secret ‘of the supernatural and sinister kind’17 whilst living within a society which shows occasional signs of discovering his true nature, just as the young men of ‘A Round of Visits’ are haunted by the fear of society’s surveillance of the private self, of exposure, and the damning revelation of sexual orientation. By shifting The Sense of the Past into an earlier era and thus equipping the time-travelling hero with a secret which hardly ‘shows’, James is enabled to query the potentially tragic divergences between private practice and the weight of public judgment, or even the state and its juridical system. The initial crossing of the threshold from the ‘wrong’ into the ‘right’ ‘world’ (SP, p. 113) acts not simply as the mechanics for Ralph’s excursion into the past but as a demarcation too of the kind of activity accessible behind ‘closed doors’. Yet within this ‘world’ that Ralph currently wishes to inhabit, James plans an ‘ideal thing for dramatic interest and sharpness’, ‘just one matter in which, just one point at which, just one link with his other identity by which, he betrays himself, gives himself away, testifies supremely to his alienism, abnormalism, the nature of his identity in short’. However reprehensible his deviation, and however ‘catchable-in-the-act’, it must not ‘terrify’ or ‘horrify’, but, rather, lead to ‘a

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finer yearningness of interest’ (SP, p. 304) – some matter, then, of the personal, a part of identity, which can survive disclosure and defeat or allay superficial judgment imposed by social conformity. James intended to limit the number of Ralph’s encounters with his ‘other’ (the most ghostly part of the plot perhaps) to three, but on the last, as he triumphantly asserts, he imagines the younger sister, ‘sweet Nan’, as he calls her, ‘catching him’, whilst he does ‘his damnedest not to show her, not to betray to her’ what has ‘befallen’ him. At this climax James considers whether or not Ralph should, ‘in vulgar fictional parlance, reveal his secret’ (SP, pp. 319–20), clearly signalling the sensational medium of exposure. The scene was never written, but would have become an addition to the series of ‘visual shocks’ which beset a number of James’s earlier protagonists, interestingly speculated upon by Leo Bersani. He sees such revelations as a form of ‘compositional compression’ derived ‘from some obsessive memory, a memory of glimpsed intimacy interpreted as both violent and treacherous’, a crisis of the psyche which we can never know of; with even broader expressive repercussions it may reflect an inability or unwillingness ‘to recuperate from the impact of that vision which explains the exasperating avoidance of fact and direct statement in the late fiction’.18 Like the other innocent, gifted young men of these latest narratives, Ralph Pendrel, rich and attractive (though weighed down by secrets, and a ‘taint of modernity’ (SP, p. 316)), will be subject to others’ wills, required to submit or pay up. The other self with whom he has exchanged places, will observe him and, by some ‘incalculable divination’, be assured of his ‘weakening’ (SP, p. 306), while his nineteenth-century contemporaries, whatever ‘malaise’ they may have suspected, will ‘cling’ to him from the shallowest motives, ‘on a hollow and quaking pecuniary basis’, to compensate for the ‘extravagances’ and ‘turpitudes’ of some previous family head (SP, p. 309). Even James himself in his extended ruminations on the novel, figures himself as the predator, the collector of specimens, who will, in effect, present the spectacle, though its subject may have been rendered metaphorically lifeless. The project, he insists, was always difficult; initially shelved when the publisher Doubleday withdrew his interest in the middle of 1900: ‘I had only … caught hold of the tip of the tail of this other monster … I will do my best to sit down to him and “mount” him with due neatness’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 151). However suggestive his analogy, James, in his pursuit of the theme, will be hardly less forgiving of Ralph than the treacherous members of that suspicious and calculating group into which he has attempted to integrate himself. Fourteen years later James was still able to retrieve, however tentatively, and with due regard to its fragility, the ‘fine, fine little silver thread of association’ to the novel, and ‘to let it dangle in the chamber of the mind’.19 He picks up the trope of August 1900, selecting the sharpest tools to illustrate the stages of

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his insights. As he then planned, he sees ‘the picture somehow’, ‘while little by little the wandering needle and the wild stitch makes the figure’ (CN, p. 190). The impression of Ralph Pendrel impaled on his creator’s bench continues in a looser context in the preparatory notes for the novel’s unwritten chapters. As if recalling that impaling moment in The Ambassadors when Mme de Vionnet pins down Strether with a golden nail, thus enlisting his good will, James six times refers, alternating between French and English, to the act of nailing down, as he anticipates ‘the turns or steps of the action’ (SP, p. 301). When Ralph confesses his secret, it will be, for James, the ‘clou and crisis and climax of my action’ (SP, p. 288), in contrast to the ‘groping’ or stumbling sensations he records elsewhere: ‘I fumble, I yearn, je tâtonne’.20 When the elder daughter breaks off her engagement to ‘Ralph’, it will serve as ‘a silver nail of perfect salience’; the event will allow Ralph to think of her younger sister and to stand ‘face to face’ with her: ‘what has this, in its concreteness, but one more silver nail?’ (SP, p. 308). A further ‘silver nail’ (SP, p. 311) will be tapped in when Ralph continues to offer the family money, allowing him to remain attentive to the younger daughter. The breaking off of the engagement with the other girl will result only in significantly exchanged looks, ‘very hard in the eye’, between Ralph and her mother (in contrast with the previous restraints on eye contact), constituting ‘another silver nail’ (SP, p. 314). James envisages three meetings between Ralph and his other, ‘each time a clou d’argent of the very sharpest salience’ (SP, p. 317). After the opening, the action of The Sense of the Past moves to England at its most traditional, yet the hero is a product of America: his name casts ‘a fine sharp traceable shadow’ and ‘his race had something of a backward, as well as of a not too sprawling lateral reach’ (SP, p. 3). In his brilliance and innocence – even in his wealth, Ralph ‘wonderful and beautiful’, embodies the nation of the twentieth century as James had come to see it, with an inwardness less evident in his depiction of the comparable heroines of the nineteenth-century fiction. The Sense of the Past, like The Ivory Tower, extends the cultural bounds of masculinity in scenes ranging far beyond contemporary accepted male norms; dialogue and gesture ignore traditional limits of expressiveness, and mutual attraction and affection find candid expression. Yet these contemporary young men are exposed to a variety of abuses, the result of the scheming self-interest of the society in which they are placed. Ralph enacts, like the protagonists of ‘A Round of Visits’, an alternative life containing socially unpalatable secrets which finds congenial respite only within a confined space (redolent of the ghetto) exclusively and uniformly constructed upon his dialogue and transactions with other men. In his notes of 1900 James touches upon the terrors he foresees in continuing with The Sense of the Past, referring to ‘the quasi-grotesque Europeo-American situation’ and perhaps thinking of that original vision of ‘slightly modern American figures’ in ‘three or four European milieux’, or Aurora Coyne, in some way

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wounded by Europe, who may have been a part of that undeveloped idea. He must keep his nerve, pursue the ‘fantasticated’ formula, rather than ‘the squeezed sponge’ method of The Turn of the Screw; but the horror-filled application of the unlikely journey back in time is to mundane, contemporary life with an individual condemned to a secrecy almost life-threatening: ‘That general formula haunts me, and as a morality as well as a terror, an idea as well as a ghost’ (CN, p. 190). As one of James’s ‘dazzling’ (SP, p. 303) young men, Ralph Pendrel is as brown-skinned as the Civil War soldiers recalled in Notes of a Son and Brother when on that American 1904–5 trip he had visited locations, some of which were part of his own youth and others carried names which had become part of the nation’s history. When the valet had told the wounded soldier in ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’, ‘“You look beautiful”’, the remark was immediately absorbed into a legitimizing speculation on what ‘ladies’ think. Now, almost fifty years later, it seems that the author of The Sense of the Past feels able, by establishing a medium of only partly ambiguous messages and endorsements, to acknowledge the possibility of behaviours expressive of involvement and attachment between men. The young man of the portrait which hangs in the Mansfield Square house, whose back is turned in ‘concealment of feature and identity’ (SP, p. 73) on the world which views him, who belongs to some ‘closed back room’ (SP, p. 88) of one’s soul, a figure therefore implicitly outside and dismissive of the socially normative, is presented, supernaturally and symbolically for Ralph’s appraisal. Ralph experiences in this meeting not a ‘sense of crime’, but rather of ‘something done in passion’, stranger, even than a ‘perpetration’ of murder; there is no resulting trauma which will entail physical reaction, but a continuity and conviction: ‘what he had accepted he still accepted’ which includes ‘excitement … muffled and compressed’, the ‘felt throb of a pulse – an inordinate charm’ (SP, pp. 87–8). Ralph even introduces an intertextual parallel from American literary tradition when he compares his need to confess his secret apprehension of this ‘prodigy’ to Hilda’s burden of guilt at her silent collusion in murder with Donatello in ‘Hawthorne’s fine novel’, The Marble Faun. His knowledge which takes him to the Ambassador’s door will lead Ralph, as he says, not to suicide, but ‘“to push my affair all the way it will go”’. He will take up one of James’s most enduring challenges, ‘“in other words to live with an intensity unprecedented”’ (SP, p. 107). Such is the power of his dialogue with the Ambassador that the reader, rather than humouring him as a ‘“queer figure”’ (SP, p. 97) or ‘“more or less raving mad”’ (SP, p. 106) (options offered by Ralph himself ), and willing, perhaps, to comply with the terms of the ghostly genre, half expects to find his historical ‘other’ waiting below in the carriage, as he has promised. When Ralph, in conversation with the Midmores, likens the nature and limitations of his knowledge to a series of doors, some opening, a few resisting,

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and, because they open from within the room, entry requiring the occupant’s acquiescence, he suggests something of the narrative’s probing, enquiring manner of accessing information and experience. He confesses, in the same scene, to his former romance with Miss Coyne, who will later be dismissed by his English betrothed as ‘“one of your pale passions”’. He agrees, though all seem (once again) to be averting their eyes: ‘“Yes, it’s a thin shade – and melts away hiding its face, even while I look back at it”’ (SP, p. 207), as if registering the transitory, even faithless nature of experience and memory. His audience, in fact, remains unsettlingly diffident in their responses; it may be something that they cannot ‘sufficiently admire’ or ‘sufficiently follow’ in him – he remains uncertain. Amongst the stares, Ralph admits that, thanks to his prospective sister-in-law, Nan, he has ‘“lived into”’ a new ‘“truth”’ (SP, pp. 208–9), and the fictional fantasy invites us to read the moment as an assertion of the novelist’s own conviction of self-renewal. James having freed himself from earlier evasions or uneasy compromises, those remembered ghosts, had accommodated his own ‘“truth”’, a celebration of opened doors on the varieties of male experience. Like Ralph Pendrel who confesses to having ‘“cultivated”’ his ‘“imagination”’ (SP, p. 247), he might have said, ‘“now I’m ready for anything”’ (SP, p. 209). At the unfinished end of his ‘First Statement’ of November 1914 where the theme is once more taken up, James declaims, ‘Above all I see –’ (SP, p. 508), as if forever offering triumphant future possibilities as his final thoughts.

11 ‘A ROUND OF VISITS’: EFFECTS ACHIEVED ‘WITHOUT THE AID OF THE LADIES’1

New York’s Waldorf-Astoria and indeed America’s ‘hotel world’ are held to signify an aspect of sociocultural practice, even anxiety, in James’s reading of the nation in The American Scene, exemplifying the compellingly public nature of social relations, the constraints upon privacy, the implicit need for public endorsement. The ‘great gaudy hotel’ in which ‘A Round of Visits’ begins projects a comparable corporate grandeur, overwhelmingly forming on the city skyline, in its hero’s eyes, ‘beside, behind, below, above, in blocks and tiers and superpositions, a sufficient defensive hugeness’. Designed ‘on “Du Barry” lines’, it is called the ‘Pocahontas’, as if in recalling the romantic legend of the native princess associated with the colonization and settlement of America, James is locating his narrative in a consciously latter-day, if perhaps ironic, national context. This last short story by James begins in ‘the massive labyrinth’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 428) of the hotel, and goes on to offer a final and fictive corollary for some of the autobiographical messages to be read in The American Scene, in the hidden drama of the interior lives of young men, their personal, mysterious anguish and the heterodox urban society in which they move. ‘A Round of Visits’, set, like ‘The Jolly Corner’, in the city to which James had recently returned after a twenty-year absence, entails guilt and forgiveness enacted within a predominantly male circle. A young man, Mark Monteith, lies ill in the opulence of a hotel room in a winter blizzard; a physician cures his influenza but fails to diagnose a more complex malaise: he has been recently betrayed by an old friend who has absconded with his (as well as other people’s) investments. Physically mended, Monteith speaks to two women he knows, hoping for sympathy; finding none, he is directed to visit, as a favour, another old male acquaintance who immediately perceives his pain, his abeyance of judgment, his sympathy, indeed love, for the criminal. This man understands, he reveals, because he has committed the same offence, and has been waiting to be arrested. The doorbell rings and, in the diversion of Monteith’s admitting the police, the disgraced friend shoots himself. – 174 –

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The story develops situations which have become familiar from The Sense of the Past, involving a largely hostile, unforgiving, exploitative social group, young men with secrets undetectable to the oblivious majority but whose disclosure will bring shame, and social dynamics which favour predominantly male exchanges of intimacy. The male protagonists are products of America, often, like James himself, with experience of the Old World, as if he is returning, in fiction at least, to the complex possibilities of the single man’s life. In the notes for The Sense of the Past he was tempted briefly, as I have said, into ‘vulgar fictional parlance’ when considering whether Ralph should ‘reveal his secret’, and indeed even these late narratives with their ghostly dimensions, concealments, financial corruption, betrayal, even gunshots, contain the sensational, potentially ‘vulgar’ events of melodrama. Both ‘The Jolly Corner’ and ‘A Round of Visits’, however, are also set in the American city, as if James, developing those dizzying sensations of The American Scene, feels able to dramatize the unsettling or subversive elements of male experience, shocked, or vibrating, as he might have said, from the energy and power of its modernity. In fact the idea for this last tale, ‘A Round of Visits’, first published in April– May 1910,2 had been with James for about sixteen years and it speaks consistently of a desire for unburdening and revelation, ‘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). In solitary anguish he seeks ‘a listening ear and answering heart’ to soothe an anxiety which requires some form of social endorsement. It is possible that the young man and his need for secrecy, the two unchanging elements, might find redemption with a woman who will prove herself the ‘fine creature he has not been certain she is’ and that in shocking him in turn with her own private disgrace – both their troubles must be ‘grave, painful, ugly’ – she will enable him to engage in action utterly selfless, in ‘pity for the sake of pity – not for the sake of the reward his pity will bring him’ (CN, pp. 94–5). The action was to be located in London, the woman returning from Paris by some ‘miracle’, an arrival the young hero would realize through intuition. The idea (or concetto, as James calls it) is still with him five years later, set in London and continuing the selfless ideal, ‘the balm for his woe residing not in the sympathy of some one else, but in the coercion of giving it – the sympathy – to some one else’ (CN, p. 179). In James’s last thoughts on the tales (including ‘A Round of Visits’) recorded in the summary paragraph he provided for the volume, The Finer Grain, his hero, like other protagonists in this collection, will gain access to ‘moving experience’ (CN, p. 577). The two crucial changes made by the time the story was published reflect the Jamesian themes with which I have been most concerned: the setting is America, more specifically, New York, and the scenes of intimate subjectivity and revelation belong exclusively to men. With its nuanced invoking of same-

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sex attraction, expressed in the novelist’s typically playful, shifting language and enacted within a hostile, self-interested urban setting which tends to trivialize women, it can be inferred that the story corresponds to the changing dynamics of James’s own life, its public expression and its maintained privacies. As if countering contemporary judgments of aberrant social or personal behaviour, James places his innocent hero between two criminals who have been his friends and to whom he privately attaches no blame. Their crimes of embezzlement bring public disgrace and, to one of them, self-inflicted death, society’s conferring of shame upon the individual. In the narrative of queer identity (to confine the term in its application to sexual orientation), in the construction of a self-consciousness, or, as Michel Foucault describes it, ‘a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself ’,3 the 1895 Oscar Wilde trials have been assigned a crucial, even symbolic role, though recent histories have proffered an alternative reading and reassessed their cultural or legal impact.4 James’s largely hostile reaction to those historical events and revelations is well documented,5 yet a more complex and uneasy assimilation is to be read in the indirection as well as the more assertive gestures of his fiction. Hugh Stevens has pointed out how a number of James’s tales after this date deal in ‘secrecy and publicity, blackmail, scandal, fear of exposure, and suicide’, suggesting that ‘these explorations may be related to the simultaneous repression and promotion of sexuality engendered by the trials’.6 James’s lengthy dwelling upon the ideas which would culminate in ‘A Round of Visits’ is first recorded one year before the Wilde débâcle, and it is difficult not to relate the story’s final features – the reallocation of gender, the romanticizing of male friendship, a corresponding weakening and critique of female roles contrasting with a long intimate scene between two males, dramatically interrupted by two policemen, and a detonation which carries both death and ensuing public disgrace – to contemporary adjustments of attitude. The crime for which men abscond to foreign parts or destroy themselves at the loss of reputation is unlikely to fall within the repertoire of career criminals (or the ‘criminal classes’); financial irregularity remains a middle-class prerogative. Such perpetrators lack what an early-twentieth-century American sociologist called the identifiable ‘stigmata of the true criminal type’, the ‘timehonored insignia of turpitude’.7 The Wilde trials (it is reputed that six hundred fearful men slipped across the English Channel at the time8) derived their political impact perhaps less from the sexual revelations involved than the fact that the accused and those threatened by prosecution belonged to the upper classes, thus undermining previously unquestioned social laws and inciting a measure of class panic. If the ostensible, public crime of James’s tale is embezzlement, the details of interiority point to a history of romantic incompletion compensated for by

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the pleasures of homosocial intimacy. In contrast with ‘In the Cage’, the story which Hugh Stevens discusses, in its representation of class difference, scandal and blackmail, as an oblique remodelling of the homosexual scandals of the 1890s,9 ‘A Round of Visits’, with its New York setting embodying an aggressive, punitive society, offers a much more expressive narrative of same-sex desire. In a realignment of James’s distaste for America’s apparent casualness in distinguishing between private and public function, the story’s representatives of social authority and service are unable to break free from their officially-designated roles. Mark Monteith awakens one Thursday morning to ‘a blinding New York blizzard’ and ‘a deep sore inward ache’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 427) for which one of the hotel physicians (‘the caravanserai … supplied everything in quantities’) prescribes him ‘warmth and quiet and broth and courage’. By Saturday he is cured and the snow has been ‘dealt with as New York, at a pinch, knew how to deal with things. Oh, how New York knew how to deal – to deal, that is, with other accumulations lying passive to its hand’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 428). Mark ‘aches’ to be ‘dealt with’, to surrender, it is implied, to the city’s ministrations, suggesting James’s own troubled spirit on refinding the city. It may well have strategies for clearing the roads, but, with much regret, Monteith can find no release for the ‘accumulations’ of experience, the personal history with which he is burdened. There remains ‘something of the heart’s heaviness he wanted so to give out’, an unhappiness only to be addressed through a process akin to the purging, painful act of vomiting, ‘extracting to the last acid strain of it, the full strength of his sorrow’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 429). If the visiting doctor had glanced – as Monteith hoped he might – at the little leather show-case which holds a photograph of Phil Bloodgood, and made enquiry, his distress might have been assuaged. Monteith has returned after a ten-year absence to find that ten days ago this old friend, who has been in charge of some of his ‘poor dividends’, has left ‘for parts unknown and as yet unguessable’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 430). The name, eccentric even by James’s standards, slyly suggests, apart from a substantial family background, something of his own thrusting masculinity.10 But the doctor fails to register these circumstances in a classic case of treating symptoms rather than seeing an individual. Thus there can be no relief for Monteith. Had such a moment occurred, it is surmised, the doctor might himself have benefited. Some mutual need might have been met between both patient and carer, if the latter had transgressed and temporarily abandoned his professional role, indeed offered it up in divulging in his turn the observed secrets of the sickroom, as he passed ‘from one queer case to another’11 – ‘prodigies of observation, flowers of oddity, flowers of misery, flowers of the monstrous, gathered in current hotel practice’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 430). The hotel has become in this fanciful catalogue of human malfunction a more mysterious and exotic institution for the study of contemporary America, but there is no exchange between the

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men. The mystery of the doctor’s interior life remains intact behind the screen of ‘professional discretion’ in this era of emerging professionalism, and Monteith will learn no more of the damage inflicted by the relentless demands of the city and those patients liberated by the terms of the fleeting ‘hotel’ relationship. The situation seems to illustrate those ‘perpetual spirals of power and pleasure’, the games of incitement and evasion, played since the nineteenth century, which Michel Foucault locates as enacting social control over ‘wayward or unproductive sexualities’ which nevertheless implicate the figure of power as well as the powerless aberrant in a pursuit of pleasure, however the balance of ‘parents and children, adults and adolescents, educator and students, doctors and patients, the psychiatrist with his hysteric and his perverts …’ is composed.12 The promiscuous range of vicarious experience available from such ‘prodigies of observation’ (‘promiscuous’ is a favourite Jamesian epithet for New York hotel life in The American Scene) accumulates an erotic force, both repulsive and engaging, from the repeated floral metaphors. The trope may originate in the gifts for the sickroom, but from Baudelaire’s emblematic Fleurs du Mal, through the French Symbolist painters, the decadence of the Fin de Siècle, to Jean Genet, the flower is translated into a sexual emblem. Mark Montieth composes in the physician’s attendance a scene charged with homoerotic potential – an illicit sharing (as E. M. Forster would phrase it) for momentary gratification initiated by ‘a hint or a jog’, but later causing regret and an empty feeling ‘afterward … that he had wasted his impulse and profaned even a little his sincerity’. Deciding that there are ‘countless possibilities’ which make ‘doctors perfunctory’ he denies himself any narcissistic pleasure and modestly realizes that ‘it wasn’t for him to relieve himself touchingly, strikingly or whatever, to such a man: such a man might much more pertinently … have emptied out there his own bag of wonders’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 430). Even within this speculation on what surprises the doctor might reveal, Monteith rationalizes with a number of emphases to remind himself coolly of who he is in relation to the doctor, recognizably ‘a man’ upon whom he dwells in some act of mutual exposure and spillage, his own load intact and discreetly sidelined. The reality leaves the anonymous doctor untouched by this fantasy: he ‘didn’t so much as glance at his cluster of portraits’. Had the scene progressed in line with Monteith’s desire for self-revelation, with the doctor turning and enquiring about the subject’s identity, ‘the cup would have overflowed and Monteith … would have relieved himself positively in tears’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 430). His influenza cured, the clue to his more serious mal de coeur lies in that cherished photograph, ‘not contemporaneous, and a little faded’, which still retains something of its subject’s masculine assertiveness: ‘Phil Bloodgood handsomely faced him’, full-frontally and disarmingly present, as the narrative so simply asserts. Despite this betrayal, Monteith has kept the portrait which exacerbates the

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painful truth of Bloodgood’s treachery, and, in a preliminary version of James’s long-planned theme of a young man longing to reveal his secret, is evidently sick of disappointed love, a truth that would shock and threaten the hotel world. For him unthinkably to reveal himself and his secret, incorrigible burden, ‘settling there face to face as something he must now live with always’, would be to expose not only a private ‘blow’ but some primitive underside of civilization, containing savagery and pathos – ‘some horrid alien thing’, ‘some violent, scared, unhappy creature’, ‘a young jibbering ape of one of the more formidable sorts’, ‘an ominous infant panther’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 427–8). This nightmarish catalogue of the fierce and unwittingly damaging (allowing for its function as a sensational ‘trail’ for the events to follow) ostensibly itemizes Monteith’s sense of betrayal, yet these creatures, iconographically linked to the workings of unbridled human sexuality, relate more generally in their potential for horror to James’s own temperamental bias, as he describes it in a letter of 1896: ‘I have the imagination of disaster and see life as ferocious and sinister’.13 The ties of distant kinship, shared school- and college-days, count for nothing in comparison with the enslaving physical charm of the unworthy Bloodgood: ‘It was because he was so beautifully good-looking, because he was so charming and clever and frank … that one had abjectly trusted him’. Yet Monteith has been tricked, less, it seems by his friend than by some larger embittered stroke of fortune, the photograph merely ‘some long effective and only at last exposed “decoy” of fate’. Even now Monteith lives with this fading memento of ‘his unremoved, undestroyed, engaging, treacherous face’ so as to sustain ‘all of the felt pang’. Unable to eject this ‘heart’s heaviness’, he continues to engage with the pain as if to disable and absorb it within his own body, to live through and consume the betrayal ‘in such a single hot, sore mouthful as would so far as possible dispose of it and leave but cold dregs’. Had the doctor only asked, Monteith would have shocked him (as he does perhaps the reader) by saying of the now distant friend, ‘“Oh, he’s what’s the matter with me”’, only slightly diminishing that continuum of challenge to sexual norms by then recounting the financial swindle. Bloodgood remains potently as that ‘single, hot, sore mouthful’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 429–30), whatever Monteith’s resolution to dilute and cool it. When Monteith emerges from his room into the ‘vast rankness’ of the hotel, he enters a microcosm of New York, ‘a complete social scene in itself ’, filled with exotic and sensational potential, ‘a great gregarious fireside’, ‘on which types might figure and passions rage and plots thicken and dramas develop’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 431). For the ‘restless analyst’ of The American Scene the hotel had indeed presented itself as ‘a synonym for civilization’ so that (balanced crucially between approval and dissent) one must ask ‘if the hotel-spirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and most finding itself ’ (AS, p. 102). At the Pocahontas, the opportunity for such a resolution of the searching spirit seems

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far less assured and Monteith’s emergence is ominously diffident. Amongst the ‘vociferous, bright-eyed, and feathered creatures’ his ‘bruised spirit drew in and folded its wings’. He is too fragile a male perhaps for this venue in which are performed ‘all the offices of life’. He bumps into Mrs Folliott, an acquaintance met in London six months earlier, whose feelings towards Phil Bloodgood, having been defrauded by him of $10,000, are much less sympathetic. He had tried misguidedly at that earlier time to defend his friend from what were then merely her suspicions, and now she causes him to feel only ‘vicarious anguish … for poor shamed Bloodgood’s doom-ridden figure’. That inflated evaluation of his friend with its indulgently melodramatic recourse to unhappy fate must remain private to the extent that Monteith is now rendered inanely speechless – ‘he felt his dry lips seal themselves to a makeshift simper’ – and he can find no relief, or ‘larger ventilation’ which might introduce ‘a diluted and less poisonous taste’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 433). He feels her ‘small faculty’ of imagination to be emasculating, even glancing around in a comically desperate way for some anonymous man, the French waiter perhaps or the just visible policeman outside, whose company and gender he might prefer. In contrast, her disturbing physical presence causes an access of sexual scorn and nausea. Sitting in the hotel’s ‘wondrous rococo salon’, she is surrounded by ‘the fleshiest imitation Boucher panels’ so that Monteith is prompted to see her (‘overdressed’ as she is) tumbling ‘on a cloud, very passably, in a fleshy Boucher manner’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 432), a ludicrous pastiche of a naked goddess, an all-too-knowing object of erotic curiosity. Monteith watches how, as she ate her meal, ‘she pawed and tossed her bare bone, with her little extraordinarily gemmed and manicured hands’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 433), in a grotesque revision of Boucher’s fetishizing of flesh, perhaps. Mrs Folliott will be his first disappointment, not in her lack of pity, but in absolutely failing to ‘give some easier turn to the mere ugliness of the main facts’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 433). When Monteith turns to a further female acquaintance for sympathy, Mrs Folliott sinks, in the light of further revelation, even further. Florence Ash has recently parted from her philandering husband, information marked by a change of register: ‘Bob had had it from her’ that they must part and he has left town because she has, ‘speaking vulgarly, knocked the wind out of him’. He has enjoyed a liaison with Mrs Folliott, though she is but ‘one of a regular “bevy”’ with whom the monosyllabically named Bob Ash (‘such a pure pearl of a donkey!’) must now ‘patch up something’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 439–40). The workings of hetero-normative relations in the New York hotel world are thus caricatured, exposed in their demeaning inconsequentiality, the traffic between the sexes reduced to the level of the farmyard or market place. The ‘terrible little lady’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 435), as Monteith characterized her, who had pilloried Bloodgood and complained of ‘her cruel sacrifice’ at his hands (CT, vol. XII, p. 432) is herself exposed as a transgressor, and so she reit-

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erates the tale’s continuous association of financial and sexual misdemeanour by figuring as both victim and perpetrator. Even worse, in Monteith’s rather affected opinion, Mrs Folliott had ‘no manners’, a failing linked crucially to an incapacity to adopt a broader view of human experience, as he puts it to himself: ‘such fantasies … any shade of inward irony, would be Greek to Mrs Folliott’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 434). Monteith’s dismissiveness of Mrs Ash arises from a similar sexual disgust. He had met her in Paris nine years ago; she now appears ‘a little more battered than from even a good nine years’ worth’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 438) and he also realizes that his own performance has disappointed, that ‘he hadn’t “amused” her, no, in quite the same way as in the Rue de Marignan time’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 440). Where Mrs Folliott had been allied (in imagination, at least) with the studied poses of Boucher’s undraped divinities, Mrs Ash is associated with the more decorous pleasures of French pastoral as Monteith is offered his ‘very own tapestry bergère, the one with the delicious little spectral “subjects” on the back and seat’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 439–40). She is ‘selfishly glad’ of his arrival and he knows what he is ‘“in” for’ as she offers up ‘the tragic-comedy of her recent existence’ to this ‘dearest and safest sympathiser in all the world’, thus relegating him to an unthreatening role of confidant, with few of the predatory male tendencies of her erring husband. Acquiescing in this conversational hyperbole, Monteith becomes predictably simpering. Both women reduce him to a foolishly demeaning silence. His lips are ‘compressed to the same passive grimace that had an hour or two before operated for the encouragement of Mrs Folliott’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 440); on leaving, he weakly conspires in sustaining her effusive style; ‘he hoped again he hadn’t too queer a grin with his assurance … that he had been thrilled to the core’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 441). Having left, he recalls ‘that exquisite last flush of her fadedness’, but she has been preoccupied with herself, dining ‘off the feast of appreciation’, while, in the anguish of his undisclosed secret, he feels as the ‘hungry man’, in the ‘extravagant sight of the preparation of somebody else’s dinner’. Released from the hermetic warmth and labyrinthine passages of the Pocahontas, Monteith is assailed by the horrors of the street. His despair is exacerbated by the tormented symbols of urban modernity as the ‘trolley-car … howled … beneath the weight of its human accretions’, and he then hears a further ‘suffering shriek of another public vehicle’. This is the same scene of terror witnessed by James in The American Scene as he sought refuge in the Waldorf-Astoria. Into Monteith’s lonely mind comes the thought that he had been offered dinner. A young ‘pretty girl’, ‘the flower’ of the ‘new crowd’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 442), at the Sunday lunch to which Mrs Folliott had invited him comes to mind. This new acquaintance, with no European or past links of friendship, has suggested he visit her widowed brother-in-law, Newton Winch – ‘he had appeared of late so down’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 435) – a former

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friend of Monteith’s. The prospect of reunion is uninviting, but he likes the girl for ‘a sense of distinction given her by her so clearly having Newton on her mind’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 436). Winch is recalled as ‘a not very sympathetic personality’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 443) and Monteith excuses himself on grounds that allow for the most socio-normative interpretation. Thinking of Mrs Ash, he explains he is ‘going to see a lady’. The girl (who remains anonymous until Winch later refers to her as Lottie) readily develops this conventional option before, more subversively, proposing Winch as a potential surrogate to replace the society lady who receives guests and dispenses hospitality: ‘“Of course you’re going to see a lady – every man in New York is. But Newton isn’t a lady, unfortunately for him, today; and Sunday afternoon in this place, in this weather, alone –!”’ She invites Monteith to counter the male habits of the rest of the city and modify gender roles by calling on a young man whose ill-luck is not to be a woman. He remains intrigued by her concern for her brother-in-law and surprised that ‘Winch – as he had known him of old – could be to that degree on anyone’s mind’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 436). Though there was little ‘of nutritive in the image of Newton Winch’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 442) in Monteith’s recollection, his sister-in-law has herself offered him dinner or, at least, ‘told him where he could go and get it’. Having escaped the hotel and its suffocating illusion of social wellbeing founded on money and ‘respectability’ (a characterization which James developed in The American Scene), Monteith is released into the city where ‘adventure’ ‘in the florid sense of the word, the sense in which it remains an euphemism’ (AS, p. 103), constitutes a possibility. The final part of ‘A Round of Visits’ can be regarded as dramatizing the dangerous pleasures of the city for James himself. This ‘seer of great cities’ (AS, p. 99) is in pursuit of ‘impressions’ as varied or ‘promiscuous’ as possible, whilst in the short story, Monteith’s ‘adventure’ will be (we assume) ‘florid’ in the eyes of the Pocahontas habitués, crossing both the financial and respectable ‘barriers’ which define and perpetuate their cohesive self-interest. James has himself transgressed, as he admits in The American Scene, and his ‘adventure’ (like Monteith’s), and the language in which it is recorded, transcend the politely aesthetic, hinting at less rarefied conquests. The rhetorical ‘voice of the streets’ chides him for the number and repeated ‘promiscuity’ of the impressions he has the ‘bad habit of receiving’, as he confesses that he has found that ‘to walk the streets … irresistibly solicited’ more ‘impressions’ than he could cope with. In an exasperated tone the ‘voice of the air’ warns him that he has created the problem himself: ‘You … are the victim of your interest, be the grounds of your perversity what they will. You can’t escape from it, and don’t you see that this, precisely, is what makes an adventure for you (an adventure, I admit, as with some strident, battered, questionable beauty, truly some “bold bad” charmer), of almost any odd stroll, or waste

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half-hour, or other promiscuous passage, that results for you in an impression?’ (AS, p. 108).14

The terms, concrete and figurative, for such a passeggiata (as James elsewhere calls it) hint, with typical coyness and however ludicrously, at a drama of libertine indulgence played out in a context which seems deliberately to leave gender unspecified. Monteith too has left the conformist rigour of the hotel scene to follow his will in the ‘violence’ and ‘revelation’ of the New York of The American Scene (AS, p. 100), the site of any potential urban ‘adventure’ in James’s terms. In the fairy-tale schema of ‘A Round of Visits’ where the first two claimants or candidates have failed the hero’s listening test, he is directed by a neutral mediator to a third trial, and the narrative, at its most ponderous, prepares for the unexpected reversal of his patronizing expectations. By some ‘agent of fate’ he finds he has remembered Winch’s number on Fiftieth Street and is enabled to act philanthropically: ‘Providence had, on some obscure system, chosen this very ridiculous hour to save him from cultivation of the sin of selfishness, the obsession of egotism, and was breaking him to its will by constantly directing his attention to the claims of others’. In attending what he regards as the ‘luckless case’ of Newton Winch, Monteith is to receive a ‘salutary discipline’, so it is appropriate that as he presses the electric doorbell (which will figure significantly later in the melodrama) he feels the ‘stimulus of a sharp poke in the side’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 443). The apartment bespeaks the wealth Monteith observes as natural to all his New York acquaintances. Yet he notes some ‘rather glaringly false accents’, ‘domestic “art” striking a little wild’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 444), as if the décor had, in its ‘costliest candour’ followed the example of the Pocahontas, thus reflecting the institutional rather than the individual. Winch’s sitting room, with its ‘quite splendidly vulgar appeal of fifty overdone decorative effects’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 445), goes even further in signalling the camp excesses of wealth. Yet the scene which brings the two men together is, by contrast, intimate and intense. Winch has been more badly ill than Monteith and, as his sister-in-law had reported, ‘the horrid poison just seemed to have entered into poor Newton’s soul’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 436). He is changed by what appear to Montieth initially to be ‘the effects of a plunge into plain clean living’ which strike him as ‘startling, sometimes almost charming’. Monteith notices Winch’s ‘convalescent smile’ and ‘fine fingers’, a fragility which quickly modifies the conventional features of masculinity; indeed, Monteith having thought him ‘constitutionally common’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 444), now finds him ‘mysteriously’ changed. In the same transition Monteith is compelled to revise his opinion of what he had thought to be the ‘portentous New York order’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 445). Having wavered at ‘vague crossways’ and ‘radiations of roads to nothing’, he had dismissively read the

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scene (in the style of the ‘restless analyst’) as ‘a perspective like a page of florid modern platitudes’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 437). But the city is far from inane and vague in its effects. Newton Winch’s acute insight into Monteith’s desolate state (unrecognized as James crushingly suggests, by Mrs Folliott and Mrs Ash, ‘the two women trained supposably in the art of pleasing’), is revelatory: ‘this astonishing ex-comrade was simply writing himself out at a stroke (into our excited friend’s imagination at all events) the most distinguished of men’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 445–6). In ‘an exhibition of the uncanny’, Winch seems to have ‘neither missed nor muffed anything’. The transformation, ‘some principle of intelligence, some art of life’, has been effected by the city itself: ‘Were these the things New York did when you just gave her all her head, and that he himself then had perhaps too complacently missed?’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 444–5). The moment marks, it seems, a further if not final revision of New York for James, acted out in the smallest, most domestic arena as a reciprocal gesture of frankness and sympathy between two men. The astonishing realization of the city’s impact upon Winch’s intuitive potential, can be read in parallel with the broader terms of James’s own recuperative life at this time, entailing a liberation from conventional gender relations, his writing constructing some of the dynamics of male intimacy evident in his private life. The fearsome machinery of progress that had almost overwhelmed him in 1904–5 had in its physical and psychic impact precipitated a new acceptance of the self and introduced him to resources for the charting of masculine subjectivity. Monteith, who regularly finds himself beset by tears, has been failed by women and, indeed, by the representative of medical science, the hotel doctor. Diagnosed as ‘“blue” enough, and from causes doubtless known to himself ’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 428), he now locates the yearned for ‘listening ear and answering heart’, an occasion which can be interpreted as an informal variant on the ‘talking cure’ of Freud and Breuer. Freud’s specifying of hysteria (a female affliction in etymology as well as in most psychoanalytical observations up to the end of the nineteenth century at least) as a cause of illness offers a relevant model for a reading of this scene between the two men which destabilizes conventional male behaviours. Traditional interpretations of male hysteria have been grounded and variously rationalized in preconceptions relating to gender and sexual orientation which have continued from the nineteenth well into the twentieth century. Elaine Showalter presents a range of historical documentary opinion on the features of the hysterical male as ‘either mentally or morally of feminine constitution’, ‘one who behaves like a woman’, as characterized by ‘softness and over-politeness, feminine facial expression and feminine behaviour’, and acting as ‘a passive homosexual’ might be imagined to act.15 The James family itself, of course, constitutes a detailed pathological case history: aside from Alice James who celebratedly embraced neurasthenia, or invalidism, as her own long-term

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form of creativeness, both William and Henry James (not to mention others of their New England circle) spent much of their young manhood in pursuit of remedies for a complex series of ailments, possibly psychosomatic conditions, which took them back and forth to Europe. Illness, for these men, defined, as Howard M. Feinstein suggests, ‘the sufferer as one possessed of unique sensibility like a poet or a saint. Not just a physical evil, illness was to be cultivated as a romantic sign of grace.’16 In a public context of broader cultural generalization, such male illness, observed historically amongst the younger generation of New England as a form of ‘nervous collapse’, is attributed to ‘overwork’.17 More privately, the two men of James’s short story gaze upon each other as fragile and convalescent, in a form of quasi-romantic rebellion against the orthodoxies and boundaries of acceptable masculinity. The narrative unhesitatingly goes on to realign the limits of established male–male discourse, introducing a modus operandi by which men can be freed from the accumulated social constraints of gender. Monteith had called on ‘coarse common Newton Winch’ ‘over-intelligently … to patronise’ him, yet the latter’s simple question rearranges the dynamics. ‘“See here, you know – you must be ill, or have had a bad shock, or some beastly upset: are you very sure you ought to have come out?”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 445). Interestingly, though New York has been instrumental in constructing Winch in his new-found distinction, he speaks in the accents of a British Edwardian gentleman, in an idiom which suggests James’s idealizing amalgamation of both British and American cultures. This freshly inscribed identity with its heightened intuitive capacity disarms, or, to use a different figure, unmans, Monteith: ‘the tears stood in his eyes; he stared through them at his friend with a sharp “Why, how do you know? How can you?”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 446). In a tale whose title might initially suggest a Victorian and female social application both men have become feminized, in having assumed stereotypically desirable qualities of emotional perception and frankness. Since Monteith has last seen him, Winch has also revised and improved his physical appearance by reducing his masculine characteristics. He has shaven off the ‘vulgarest of moustaches’, displaying his fine lips, comically designated as ‘extravagantly sensitive labial connections’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 447). He is now ‘happily transfigured’, unlike Phil Bloodgood who had taken the same step, though to ill-effect, leaving ‘nothing to “make up” for it in case of removal’. Winch has removed an aspect of his masculinity, taken the risk of ‘showing his “real” mouth’, and revealed ‘the mobile, interesting, ironic line the great double curve of which connected … the strong nostril with the lower cheek’ which unarguably, during Monteith’s lingering study of his face, captured his ‘refinement’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 448). James himself had taken similar steps at the start of the century when, at the age of fifty-seven, he had shaved off his beard, ‘unable to bear longer the hoariness of

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its growth’.18 Leon Edel points out that he had worn a beard ever since the Civil War, so that the gesture, rescinding some earlier need to express a masculinity which had not been confirmed by enlistment, suggests a reconciliation with what might be seen as his own compromised sense of manhood. Full lips appear, of course, as contributory signs of effeminacy in some of the caricatures or illustrations of the time; for example the portraits of Oscar Wilde by Max Beerbohm, Ralph Hodgson and Toulouse-Lautrec all hint at his notoriety or defiance in challenging conventional ideas of masculinity by accentuating such physical detail.19 James’s mannered comedy of circumlocution which admires Winch’s freshly-revealed lips betrays a degree of uneasiness, a lapse of confidence marked by verbal excess and ingenuity. Monteith’s observations are made in a context of mysterious closeness and expectation, as if each man, in a state of mutual physical awareness, teeters riskily on the verge of revelation or declaration. He notices, in an insight expressed in typically Jamesian syntax, ‘the quite more intensely and more irresistibly drawn grin, the quite unmistakeably deeper consciousness in the dark, wide eye’ – an unexpected depth of engagement he returns to, still ‘curiously gaping’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 447) in surprise at the pleasing transformation in his old acquaintance. James has characterized his lifelong devotion to the gathering of impressions as a habit of ‘gaping’, though in the autobiographical writing the pursuit has assumed a homoerotic warmth in his ‘gaping’ at ‘the shining revels’ and the ‘laughing, welcoming, sunburnt young men’ in the Civil War training camp when he likens himself with a degree of unease to ‘the good Walt’ and ‘dear old Walt’ Whitman.20 In this more deeply appreciative condition, Monteith wonders with just a jarring colloquialism signalling a sexual anxiety ‘whether the quite ordinary peepers of the Newton Winch of their earlier youth could have looked under any provocation, either dark or wide’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 447). In his surprised speculation on Winch’s transformation, Monteith has invoked those loci of orthodox romantic yearning – the eyes and the lips – in a newly-achieved tenderness which feels free to linger and wonder, careless of cultural masculine stereotypes. Winch continues to retain his mystery; his ‘incoherent’ welcoming of Monteith (offering redundant cigars, cigarettes and matches, relieving his guest of coat, hat and walking stick) contrasts with the superficial collectedness of the two New York women and appears at odds with his disarming perceptiveness. He smiles as ‘another creature than the creature known to Mark; all the while with the history of something that had happened to him ever so handsomely shining out’. He is beautified by his knowledge, ‘radiantly’ ‘interested’ in Monteith’s having called. Winch has immediately validated Monteith’s pent-up distress and each competes in more deeply satisfying the other in a repetition of the scene in The Sense of the Past where Ralph and Perry vie with each other; for a time ‘each tried to see which could accuse the other of the greater miracle of penetra-

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tion’. In this state of mutual excitement, Monteith bursts out, ‘“There must be, my dear man, something rather wonderful the matter with you!”’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 446–7). The condition, in fact the price of Winch’s enlightened state, his grasp of Monteith’s mix of grief and desire, will (to resort to the ‘vulgar fictional parlance’ which worried James) prove to be death, marked by the offstage pistol shot, as if such rapture can only be temporary. Monteith’s observation of Winch’s clean-shaven state has unhappily reminded him, with the ‘queer touch of association’, of Bloodgood, who has so damaged and yet sensitized his own new self and who has ‘brought about the state of his own soul’, currently ‘being with the lapse of every instant registered’ by his host. In this disturbingly probing yet nurturing presence he finds the kindness denied him when he had thrown himself ‘into Mrs Folliott’s arms and into Florence Ash’s’. The contrast is pointed and Winch’s restrained appropriation of him is welcomed: ‘It was as if his personal case had already been touched by some tender hand – and that, after all, was the modest limit of its greed’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 448). In this gentler domain where a desperate clutching at female solace has given way to a simple male touch (though it is the grasping hand of a criminal), Monteith feels fulfilment. That tender gesture which he imagines becomes reassuringly concrete later in the scene, as if James is dramatizing the tactile language and affectionate verbal embraces characteristic of his letters to the young men of these years.21 Winch wishes to hear his friend’s story and be leaned upon – ‘“only let me, nervous beast as I am, take it standing!”’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 448–9). In acknowledging the social deviancy of the scene and its verbal and physical promotion of male vulnerability and interdependence, the narrative pauses to ‘invite’ the reader to become ‘a momentary watcher’ to catch ‘the air’ between the two men – with curiosity on one side and, on the other, ‘an eventually fascinated acceptance of so much free and in especial of so much right attention’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 449). In this unusually leading directive for a suitable reading strategy, James signals the virtues of homosocial solicitude, the way in which men can, as Monteith says, ‘minister’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 446) to each other. Having endured hearing Mrs Folliott vilify Bloodgood on her own account, Monteith wishes to avoid listening to comparable indignation voiced on his own behalf by Winch: his ‘wound’ is open, ‘he winced at hearing the author of it branded’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 449), and the pain is for himself as well as for Bloodgood . His eroticized possession of Bloodgood, his ‘abjection’ before this ‘beautifully good-looking’ man, is complete. Monteith can only ‘squirm’ on hearing him blamed, imagining ‘the sort of hell in which he now must be’, romantically driven to see the ‘propitiatory side’ of ‘basest misdeeds’. In this rarefied privacy Monteith can allow himself, standing ‘face to face’ with Winch, to register the charm of a man’s smile (a living presence this time rather than a faded photograph). The mood is seductive and anticipatory, ‘with Newton smiling

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and smiling so appreciatively’ that Monteith must wonder ‘when before a man had ever grinned from ear to ear to the effect of its so becoming him’. This is a physically nervous encounter, however, containing eccentric, disquieting detail. Monteith cannot help noticing Winch’s hands ‘deep in his pockets’, watching ‘his long fingers beat a tattoo on his thighs’ as, before the fireplace, he ‘dangled and swung himself ’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 450). Even as Monteith feels the relief he has sought, of making a ‘wry face to somebody, and your letting me and caring and wanting to know’, the death-dealing horror of unforgiving public judgment beyond their room penetrates ‘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’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 450–1). In wondering what can be ‘done’ for Bloodgood, Monteith ‘flounders’, overwhelmed by recollection, and unable to condemn – ‘a great rush of mere memories, a great humming sound as of thick, thick echoes’, so that he must ‘take care’ that he should not ‘howl’. He longs to see Bloodgood, though, in pitiful self-abnegation, confesses, ‘“I don’t say that I should like him to see me!”’ With one of Winch’s ‘noted fine hands’ resting on his shoulder, his frankness grows in this state of exaltation: ‘“I’d go to him. Hanged if I wouldn’t – anywhere!”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 451). The only jarring note for him occurs when he adds ‘“when we’ve turned around”’, that is, when Winch will have helped him through the present crisis. Winch hesitates momentarily: his own suicidal plans are already in place. But it is he who can name Bloodgood as a swindler whilst Monteith tends to incoherence, unable to understand ‘“how, after such things –” … he couldn’t name them’. Winch, too, can complete Monteith’s sentence for him, exposing his abjection in ironically businesslike terms: ‘Such things as you’ve done for him … such services as you’ve rendered him’. ‘Ah, from far back. If I could tell you … If I could tell you! … The sort of relation, I mean, I mean; ever so many things of a kind –!’ Again, however, he pulled up; he felt the tremor of his voice.

Monteith wishes to continue his role as victim in seeking out once more the wrongdoer, as Winch says, ‘“in kindness”’. He has taken on responsibility for Monteith’s faltering narrative, sustaining a vicarious excitement at his friend’s passion, four times patting his shoulder and urging him to ‘“tell me”’ so that ‘their eyes meet again’. Monteith with only the faintest impression that ‘there was still something the matter’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 452) is assured by Winch of the good each is doing the other and told, ironically, that ‘“You save my life!”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 453). An unidentified noise recalls the city outside, but Winch reassures Monteith who has warned him, with the suggestiveness of the letter-writing James, that it is his own fault ‘“if you make me take advantage of you”’, to which Winch

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replies that he feels ‘“blessed”’, that he listens because ‘“it’s exactly what I want to do”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 453). During Winch’s further awkward movements – his ‘violently shaking keys or money … in his trousers pocket’, his ‘shaking to extravagance again his long legs’, his repeated invitation to his companion to sit down, his apparent desire to retrieve an object he wishes to remain hidden, the slightest resulting pause in the conversation – the two men reach ‘a new consciousness’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 453–4). An incongruous pistol lies on the floor between them, noticed by Monteith in the ‘very act of blinking … lasting the millionth of a minute; he sees ‘something small and queer, neat and bright, crooked and compact’. The object which contains fulfilment or death absorbs the attention of both men just as the phallus may serve as the focus of homoerotic desire. Indeed the pistol gains additional phallic allure by the pressure of Winch’s foot ‘surreptitiously applied to giving it the right lift’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 455–6) as he attempts to conceal it. He challenges Monteith to respond to his self-exposure, reiterating a phrase which unexpectedly suggests male vulnerability: ‘“Aren’t you going to take advantage of me, man – aren’t you going to take it?”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 455). With an irritation ‘sharp and almost imperious’, he insists ‘“in God’s name”’ that Monteith carry on talking, who only then guesses at ‘a deep trouble’ distinct from his own. He is right as Winch affirms, while pointing out, however, that ‘“My interest was in your being interesting … turning you on was exactly what I wanted”’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 455–6). He must mean that he wished to allow Monteith to unburden himself, as one turns on a tap.22 Yet as so often and uncannily happens in James’s writing, a later reading carries a more colloquial, sexual nuance, here involving arousal. In fact the text itself engages in a comparable activity of unpacking the simplest of popular locutions when Winch admits to Monteith that he will wait and be judged, that he has ‘stayed to take it’. ‘“To take it?” he echoed; and then, though faltering a little, “to take what?”’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 457–8). In a reallocation of authority, Monteith now begs that Winch talk to him, laying his hand on his shoulder, ‘as shortly before he had felt Winch’s own pressure of possession and detention’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 456); indeed he grasps both of his shoulders. In Winch’s eyes there is ‘no shadow of a secret left’ as he offers himself up to save Monteith the ‘“trouble”’ of going to Bloodgood: ‘“You see I’m such another”’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 457). He too is a swindler and the shame of that criminality is expressed in terms of contemptible otherness, hardly worth naming, in contrast with Monteith’s earlier struggles to find adequate words. Given the story’s preoccupation with the social disgrace of crime and its invitation to read financial misdemeanour as code for an illicit sexuality (exacerbated by Monteith’s morally subversive insistence on continuing to love the criminal) Winch’s confession carries the pain of sexual otherness: he is, to use a later discriminatory designation, one of ‘them’.

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Unlike Bloodgood, though, he has stayed to ‘take it’, and, we must infer, continues to ponder his own mortality in selflessly accommodating Monteith’s unburdening. As he speaks, the previous off-stage noise is explained in a moment of theatre by a ringing of the doorbell and Monteith feels in the body he holds ‘a sensibly intenser vibration of the whole man’. It is a consummation for both men: Monteith has shared his secret, and has ‘tided’ Winch ‘over’ during his wait. He looks him ‘deep in the eyes’; ‘another long, mute exchange’ passes as, thinking of the pistol, Monteith invokes Winch’s ‘honour’. ‘“My ‘honour’?”’ he mocks, as Monteith moves to open the front door. Dropping his ‘guarding hands’ from his shoulders Monteith tells him, ‘with a last look’, ‘“You’re wonderful”’, an assertion immediately devalued by Winch’s ironic reply. He has placed himself within that shameful group of swindlers of which Bloodgood also has membership; ‘“We are wonderful”’, he replies. The sound of the bell again ‘pierced the warm cigaretted air’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 458), signalling the imminent breaching of this tangibly male retreat. This final scene of the two waiting men, the arrival of two policemen, the impending public disgrace, has a celebrated historical precedent in the Cadogan Hotel in 1895 when Oscar Wilde and Robbie Ross received a similar visit. Though James’s policemen avoid the Savoy opera caricature of John Betjeman’s reimagining of the scene in ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’,23 their polite questioning of Monteith, ‘“Don’t you think, sir, you might have prevented it?”’ is similarly wide of the mark. Monteith’s own self-accusation for having revealed himself as one who will set aside blame and embrace the man (Bloodgood, and literally Winch) – ‘“I really think I must practically have caused it”’ – naturally bypasses them. This completes the cycle of incomprehension in the tale, a matter now of civil law, a reading of events by the police which has no eye for the detail that a more feminized sensibility might bring. The tale’s events demonstrate that there can probably be no endorsement of the relationships between Monteith, Winch and the absent Bloodgood by the guardians of social wellbeing and order – medical science as represented by the doctor and the policemen, or ‘peacemakers of the earth’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 459). The consolations and pleasures of male intersubjectivity remain confidential, unobserved in a society typified by the two women, inhabitants of the exotic, overheated jungle of the hotel. Not only, as sometimes happens in James’s fiction, do they fail to mediate or authorize male–male relations, but they belong, as he described them years earlier, with a degree of sexual repugnance, to that group categorized as ‘the ladies’ when he archly confessed his envy of the ‘heartless independence’ of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, whose fiction remains largely free of women and who shows no need for ‘a petticoat to inflame him’.24 However intricate its linguistic games, nuances and innuendoes, this story of New York life, in which wealth so ostentatiously furnishes scenes as well as con-

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stituting its main motivation in financial corruption, connects James once more with his city of birth. ‘A Round of Visits’ contains a combination of messages, the messages which James read in that visit of 1904–5 refined to two extremes – the public routine of the hotel, its devotion to stifling luxury and disregard for private or imaginative life, and the romantic possibilities of homoerotic desire, the pleasure of an ‘adventure’, enacted beyond judgment behind closed doors. Yet such transgression is dangerous and punishable: even as Newton Winch prepares to reveal himself, his face appears to Monteith as ‘a gaping wound’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 457), anticipating the final horror of the upturned ‘disfigured’ face of the ‘wonderful’ man who cannot endure the prospect of public disgrace or even private pity. Unlike Rowland Mallet at the end of Roderick Hudson, who is allowed several hours alone with the hero’s body to gaze in love and guilt upon it,25 Mark Monteith is attended and constrained by ‘the emissaries of the law’ exhaling ‘a gruff imprecation’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 459).

12 WAKING UP TO ‘SOME PRETTY BIG THINGS’ IN THE IVORY TOWER

In his publicity paragraph for the final collection of tales, The Finer Grain, in which ‘A Round of Visits’ appeared, James names as his prevailing subject ‘the agitating, the challenging personal adventure’, to be undertaken by a ‘hero who exhibits this finer grain of accessibility to suspense or curiosity, to mystification or attraction’.1 He suggests (and his summary seems focussed on the ‘hero’ and male experience) a continued engagement not merely with the drama of the interior life, but with the mysterious or disturbing possibilities of a narrative whose ‘adventure’ may contain the ‘florid’ features he mentions in The American Scene.2 The description, as he says, performs as a euphemism for his being promiscuously assailed by (or even his hunting down of ) impressions, hinting at the illicit or reprehensible, an oblique admission of the transgressive character of his late themes. The final and incomplete novel, The Ivory Tower, continues to experiment with the ‘agitating’ and ‘challenging’ in ways much more subversive than those critical readings which confine themselves to the theme of James’s disgust with the values of American business and the ‘world of the American rich … gross and devoid of the humane’.3 Its location once more relates the novel to his twentieth-century return to the New World, but the Newport setting and its associations with James’s own young manhood in the Civil War years serves to construct a fictionalized America which promises an innocence and idealism impossible to be realized except within an imagined circle of predominantly male affection, a version of the novelist’s reading of his own life and his refinding of America. Women act as mother figures, potential lovers, confidantes, even conspirators, but it is masculine interaction, men’s absorption with each other, their mutual appraisal and transgenerational trust which places the novel so precisely within the evolving dynamics of James’s fascination with homosocial relations. The Ivory Tower reverses the journey of so many James novels. Its hero, Gray Fielder, has been summoned back to Newport from Europe by his rich, dying uncle (to whom his mother is a half-sister). He is waited for impatiently by Rosanna Gaw, two years older, and a friend from childhood, whose father is also ill. His uncle finds Gray as innocent and uncorrupted by business as he – 192 –

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hopes, and bequeaths him a large fortune before he dies. Gray turns for financial guidance to another old friend, Horton Vint, who has not married his lover, Cissy Foy, as neither has sufficient funds. Having received a letter from Rosanna’s father, who is now also dead, Gray stores it unopened in an ornamental ivory tower.4 Its contents remain a mystery, though it perhaps offers him Rosanna in marriage. Over time (according to the surviving notes which follow the three and a half ‘books’ completed out of ten) Horton swindles Gray; the fact is tacitly acknowledged, but Gray takes no action against his friend. The links with ‘A Round of Visits’ – betrayal and forgiveness enacted between men, the disgrace of criminal exposure (financial/moral), women relegated to lesser roles – indicate the nature of the ‘adventures’ to which James felt committed in this final period. He would live, with increasingly poor health, for almost two years after developing the notes for the novel in summer 1914, but, with the outbreak of world war, found he ‘could no longer work upon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life’.5 Despite the recollection of a new-found America and an evident freedom to explore the possibilities of same-sex affection and desire, he must have concluded the values – not to mention the young men – of pre-war European society to be in process of annihilation.6 In what remains of the novel, the references to Europe (as well as the Newport setting) touch on James family history; a childhood scene between Gray and Rosanna is recalled, for instance, as occurring in a Dresden museum, one of the European cities in which the young William James studied experimental physiology in the 1860s. But it is the observed life of the New England coast rather than the ‘fantastically bristling New York’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 338) of the late short stories that allows James to introduce a newly-formulated American scene. Even the grotesque white elephants which belong to those made rich by business, the ‘“awful game of grab”’, as Rosanna Gaw calls it (IT, p. 33), and against which he fulminates in the Newport chapter of The American Scene, are regarded differently. The rich families of The Ivory Tower may occupy these same ostentatious houses, but indignation has given way to comic irony as Rosanna watches ‘the big bright picture of the villas, the palaces, the lawns and the luxuries’, aware of ‘something like the chink of money itself in the murmur of the breezy little waves at the foot of the cliff ’ (IT, p. 22). An even greater adjustment is evident in the role imagined for Gray – a prospect of wealth and an innocence which will not be corrupted as James envisions the possibility of a new America which entirely fulfils his expectations. We must assume too that, even in the event of the deception to be played upon him by Horton Vint, Gray will sustain, for the sake of male friendship, his benevolence and allow affection to outweigh judgment. Gray’s arrival in New York has exceeded his expectations: everything ‘plays’ before him with ‘a delightful violence’; ‘impressions’ and ‘emotions’ available ‘in a measure beyond his dream’. In a re-enactment of other fictional scenes of

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mutual male appreciation, the narrative fixes on Gray’s smile. Standing in his Newport room he is transformed by happiness, in almost palpable form, so that, by extension, he seems, himself, almost good enough to eat: It was still beyond his dream that what everything merely seen from the window of his room meant to him during these first hours should move him first to a smile of such ecstasy, and then to such an inward consumption of his smile, as might have made of happiness a substance you could sweetly put under your tongue (IT, p. 72).

Though his kinsman ‘lay dying a few rooms off ’, Gray cannot be accused of ‘levity’ since ‘his liability to recreation represented in him a function serious indeed’. James imagines Gray, it seems, as affirming an American future: slender and fragile, he is gazed upon lovingly, initially by the narrator and later by other men and women, embodying an innocence and potential, some ideal of youth by means of which the ageing James makes a valedictory gesture towards his native land. Such optimism suggests that the novelist still possessed ‘a world of life’, a phrase he uses of the mature Shakespeare, ‘monster and magician of a thousand masks’,7 who created The Tempest. Gray, in some vision of future promise, recognizes – and ‘that was the secret’ – the weight of his own earlier American past and his own necessity for registering, as fully as possible, the present, as it ‘shouts’ in his ear (IT, p. 72). Such a fusion of the individually and the culturally momentous, the revelatory return from exile and the glimpse of a challenging future, contains some echoes of James’s own renewed apprehension of America, a moving projection on to a young and fragile sensibility of the excitement of becoming open to experience. Like Ralph Pendrel, the hero will become ‘ready for anything’, a drama which James never tired of restaging. Now Gray knows that ‘when, from far back, during his stretch of unbroken absence, he had still felt, and liked to feel, what air had originally breathed upon him, these piercing intensities of salience had really peopled the vision’ (IT, p. 72). In using the term ‘saliences’ for the more conspicuous landmarks of memory, James may remind us once more of his plans for The Sense of the Past, where the term is twice used to signify those small silver nails which mark, almost percussively, certain turning points in Ralph Pendrel’s life.8 Gray does no less at this point than dedicate himself to that same Jamesian vocation of openness: ‘Wasn’t he gathering in a perfect bloom of freshness the fruit of his design rather to welcome the impression to extravagance, if need be, than to undervalue it by the breadth of a hair?’ The appropriate condition for the gathering of impressions involves a form of total immersion or abandonment of the self: ‘Inexpert he couldn’t help being, but too estranged to melt again at whatever touch might make him, that he’d be hanged if he couldn’t help, since what was the great thing again but to hold up one’s face to any drizzle of light?’ (IT, p. 73).

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This pledging of the self to experience and an embracing of the future occurs in a room identified as wholesomely and perfectly American, as if, indeed, Gray’s transformation involved a reclaiming of his nationhood: ‘There it was, the light, in a mist of silver, even as he took in the testimony of his cool bedimmed room, where the air was toned by the closing of the great green shutters. It was ample and elegant, of an American elegance, which was so unlike any other … that some of its material terms and items held him as in rapt contemplation’ (IT, p. 73). In his ability to find in this empty room the material for such sustained introspection, Gray is evidently a worthy young Jamesian protégé. With its green shutters it is a place which seems familiar from James’s own history, in which a young man contemplates his future, reminding us of the occasion when the novelist himself at a similar age, hearing of Hawthorne’s death, had wept. At that moment James may have pondered his own position and his place in the national tradition, as one critic has suggested.9 In his desire for the sundering of unwanted ‘connections’, Gray will not be disappointed: ‘his cherished hope of the fresh start and the broken link would have its measure filled to the brim’. But it is a fearful prospect: ‘the process of assimilation … might stop short … if he so much as breathed too hard’. He must retain a ‘decent delicacy, a dread of appearing even to himself to take big things for granted’. James himself had returned to America with the effect that he now imagines an innocent young man’s privileged future in a landscape full of refreshing potential, the appropriate inheritor of an immense wealth derived from business. Gray’s optimism belongs to the New World, as James asserts with nostalgic simplicity: ‘There was an American way for a room to be a room, a table a table, a chair a chair and a book a book – let alone a picture on a wall a picture, and a cold gush of water in a bath of a hot morning a promise of purification; and of this license all about him, in fine, he beheld the refreshing riot’ (IT, p. 74). Under ‘the spell’ of this adventure in prospect, Gray will find himself an object for other men, in a legitimized context, to gaze upon in frank physical appraisal and admiration. His newly-lit world will serve to accommodate this unorthodoxy which, in ‘A Round of Visits’, remains discreetly within the confines of a warm, heavily-decorated room. The one scene between Gray and his dying uncle, Mr Betterman, whose heir he will become, avoids talk of death or reference to the impedimenta of mortal illness. Indeed, the old man has had himself freshly shaved, in preparation, ‘part of an earnest recognition of his guest’s own dignity’, and greets him in a ‘great pure fragrant room, bathed in the tempered glow of the afternoon’s end’. Gray realizes that he is, in fact, ‘On show, yes – that was it, and more wonderfully than could be said’ (IT, pp. 97–8). Yet it is he, in his slenderness (he presses only ‘lightly’ having been invited to sit on his uncle’s bed (IT, p. 104)), who passes initial judgment, confessing his admiration

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for this long-estranged relative. Asked by his uncle whether everything ‘comes up’ to what he has seen (in Europe, presumably) he replies, ‘“Oh, you come up to everything – by which I mean, if I may, that nothing comes up to you! I mean, if I may”, he smiled, “that you yourself, uncle, affect me as the biggest and most native American impression that I can be exposed to”’ (IT, p. 99). The repetitions might well have been removed if James had further ‘fingered’ his work in revision, without diminishing Gray’s sense of his uncle’s grandeur in embodying something of what he feels to be the beneficent spirit of America itself. The young man talks as if death were not imminent, constructing the scene in that typically late-Jamesian way in which protagonists creatively and humanely circle (without ever specifying) what lies before them. The dying man expresses his physical pleasure in gazing on his young nephew, confiding his feelings in the simplest, frankest way. What Gray has to say matters much less than his physical presence – how he sounds and looks: ‘“Well”, said Mr. Betterman, and again as with a fond deliberation, “what I’m going to like, I see, is to listen to the way you talk. That”, he added with his soft distinctness, a singleness of note somehow for the many things meant, “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”’ (IT, pp. 99–100). Gray, in his slightness and vulnerability, has in the past been the object of others’ benevolent attention, a final version of the unexpectedly fragile young men of ‘A Round of Visits’, eroticized through the charm of illness. Rosanna Gaw, ‘the large loose ponderous girl’ (IT, p. 1) has ‘interfered’ in her role as mediator (presumably in the matter of suggesting that Gray should be Betterman’s chief beneficiary), and succeeded in making ‘his rich uncle want him’ (IT, p. 28). She has recovered her own ‘sense of the past’, and confides to her Newport neighbour, Davey Bradham, how Gray as a boy had dutifully accompanied her (two years his senior) through ‘the great Gallery’ (IT, p. 36) of Dresden years earlier. But he had been crying and she dares to point this out: he confesses that he has been assigned the impossible duty of deciding whether his mother will remarry in Europe or return to America and his uncle, Mr Betterman. Rosanna’s speaking out was worthwhile, as she tenderly records: ‘“there he was on a small divan, swinging his legs a little and with his head … back against the top of the seat and the queerest look in his flushed face. For a moment he stared hard, and then at least, I said to myself, his tears were coming up. They didn’t come, however – he only kept glaring as in fever; from which I presently saw that I had said not a bit the wrong thing, but exactly the very best”’ (IT, p. 38). In thus bypassing conventional good manners, Rosanna has offered the confessional relief denied Mark Monteith by the doctor (amongst others) in ‘A Round of Visits’. Gray Fielder’s fragility was part of James’s original plan, so that he might be contrasted with the broader bodies and, indeed, dealings of America, subjected

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implicitly to their wills, as the novelist indicates in his ‘Notes for The Ivory Tower’, printed by Percy Lubbock in the first edition to follow the text of the incomplete novel: ‘He isn’t, N.B., big, personally, by which I mean physically; I see that I want him rather below than above the middling stature, and light and nervous and restless; extremely restless above all in presence of swarming new and more or less aggressive, in fact quite assaulting phenomena’ (IT, pp. 329–30). Standing at the bedside, Gray modestly but charmingly displays himself for his uncle, wishing he had more to offer: ‘“Well”, Gray harmoniously laughed again, “if even that can give you pleasure –!” He stood as for inspection, easily awkward, pleasantly loose, holding up his head as to make the most of no great stature. “I’ve never been so sorry that there isn’t more of me”’ (IT, p. 100).10 Mr Betterman is reassured that he has made the right choice in his bequest: the young man, ‘a perfect clean blank’ (IT, p. 108), has none of the corruption of the business mind. The scene makes Gray a willing, gratified object of admiration; redeemed by his own inescapable innocence, he is, his uncle tells him repeatedly, ‘“different”’, a triumph simply by dint of being himself: ‘though he had never felt himself, within his years, extraordinarily or excitingly wrong, so that this felicity might have turned rather flat for him, there was still matter for emotion, for the immediate throb and thrill, in finding success so crown him. He … had never known his brow brushed or so much tickled by the laurel or the bay (IT, p. 100). The final coyly classical allusion to the symbols of victory, from the Hellenic culture which endorsed the admiration of male beauty, is introduced in the most simple and sensuous way as Gray feels his forehead ‘brushed’ or ‘tickled’ by the metaphorical leaves which adorn him.11 Unconstrained by conventional formations of masculinity, he surrenders to the sensation of feeling possessed, like a perfect, valuable collector’s item, without volition or responsibility, a state ‘in which nothing seemed to depend on him’ (IT, p. 106): ‘“… I’ve got you – without a flaw. So!” Mr. Betterman triumphantly breathed. Gray’s sense was by this time of his being examined and appraised as never in his life before – very much as in the exposed state of an important “piece”, an object of value picked, for finer estimation, from under containing glass’ (IT, pp. 105–6) – a later embodiment of the golden bowl without flaw, wrought by ‘“some very fine old worker and by some beautiful old process … a lost art”’.12 In his uncle’s eyes he possesses an unarguable, romantic perfection: ‘“I won’t have you but as I want you … I want you just this way.”’ The young man continues to sit on the invalid’s bed as ‘they exchanged, at their close range, the most lingering look yet’ (IT, p. 105). Though treasured, he is vulnerable and ‘exposed’ to be chastely handled by another man, yet freshly apprised of his worth and beauty. He senses in this American room, ‘lighted in such a way that the clear deepening west seemed to flush toward it’ (IT, p. 96), ‘something beautiful and spreadingly clear – very much as if the wide window and the quiet clean sea and the finer sunset light

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had all had, for assistance and benediction, their word to say to it’ (IT, p. 105). The deathbed detail is only superficially Dickensian; here men speak without inhibition, observe and are observed with pleasure. Yet Betterman is dying and if he ‘has’ Gray in all otherness and difference it is as a bequest or gift, it seems, for America itself and the relentlessly acquisitive society that the old man has himself helped to create. When Gray asks him how he is different, his uncle replies, ‘“From what you’d have been if you had come”’ (IT, p. 101) – that is his value. As if ready for this new role to be conferred by his uncle, Gray, who insists he understands or likes ‘“nothing … so little as the mystery of the ‘market’ and the hustle of any sort”’ (IT, p. 109), feels ‘practically clean and in condition’, sensing ‘an uplifting, a fantastic freedom, a sort of sublime simplification’. The simple physical touch of Mr Betterman’s hand transcends the promise of material wealth: ‘He was really face to face thus with bright immensities, and the handsome old presence from which, after a further moment, a hand had reached forth a little to take his own, guaranteed by the quietest of gestures at once their truth and the irrelevance, as he could only feel it, of their scale’ (IT, p. 106). James’s letters, in similar transgenerational relationships with admired young men, consistently express affection in an imagined embrace or touch of a hand,13 the gestures which characterize this scene. Gray anticipates a conventional, dying request that his uncle (still holding his hand) may be allowed to consign him to the care of Rosanna, the girl who has loved him since childhood, a moment of suspense marked by an untypical exclamatory sentence: ‘Cool and not weak, to his responsive grasp, this retaining force, to which strength was added by what next came’ (IT, p. 106). But Gray is wrong; he is valued for ‘“being as I say”’, that is, as embodying an innocence recognized by his uncle, to be made over not to a woman in some private, sentimental role, but rather to ‘the world’ – ‘“your great public”’ (IT, p. 107) as Gray exclaims disbelievingly. But his uncle who has ‘“been business and nothing else in the world”’ is keen to reassure him: ‘“we require the difference that you’ll make”’ (IT, p. 110). The prospect of such a national destiny is almost ludicrous, as Gray himself realizes when he imagines himself flippantly, with ‘the very candour of the greedy’, confiding that he’s prepared for anything – ‘“in the way of a huge inheritance”’. In the event, he contents himself simply by saying, ‘“If I only understood what it is I can best do for you”’ (IT, p. 111). With these cryptic simplicities verging on the banal, James approaches his large theme of the ugliness of American society and ‘the enormous preponderance of money’. As Mr Betterman says, ‘“Money is their life”’ (IT, p. 108). Nevertheless within this private arena in which a life is ending, James introduces the possibility of some reconstituted America, freed from the vulgar influence of material wealth by an imagined benefactor such as Gray, who, though he might be later duped by the sharp practice of Horton Vint, will continue to favour integrity and loyalty to an old friend. When Mr Betterman’s nurse, Miss Good-

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enough, enters she is moved to comment, ‘“… you look too sweet together!”’ (IT, p. 114). Her gender allows her to make such a remark, just as later Cissy Hoy, Horton (or Haughty) Vint’s girlfriend, can say of Gray, ‘“It’s too charming that he yearns so for Haughty – and too sweet that Haughty can now rush to him at once”’ (IT, p. 178). Yet, in the sickroom scene the pointedly emblematic surnames of Betterman and Goodenough allow for no doubt about the relative weighting of James’s interest. Miss Goodenough has taken the invalid’s pulse whilst he still holds Gray’s hand and the continued references to ‘the hand’s tenure’ (IT, p. 108) indicate the tenderness between them. Even after her arrival, Gray feels (in comically late-Jamesian circumlocution) ‘the undiminished freshness of her invalid’s manual emphasis’, and is moved ‘to some play of disengagement; whereupon he knew himself again checked’. Miss Goodenough feels her patient’s pulse, but ‘without the effect of his releasing his visitor’. As the scene concludes, both men seem infantilized, as if illustrating the innocence so beloved of the elder. Mr Betterman explains to his nurse the outcome of the interview as if he has himself become a schoolboy once more. As he had hoped, he has triumphed: ‘“I mean I’ve got him; I mean I make him squirm” – which words had somehow the richest gravity of any yet; “but all it does for his resistance is that he squirms right to me”’ (IT, pp. 114–15). As the interview draws to a close, Mr Betterman begs for a little more time, though not to talk: ‘“I just like to look at him”’. To which Miss Goodenough replies, ‘“So do I … but we can’t always do everything we want”’ (IT, p. 115). Ironically it is Gray who is fatigued rather than his uncle, reduced to a boyish awkwardness: ‘Have I quite worn you out?’ Mr. Betterman calmly inquired. As if indeed finished, each thumb now in a pocket of his trousers, the young man dimly smiled. ‘I think you must have – quite’ (IT, p. 116).

Gray is thus groomed, within this setting of male affection and wealth, for his American future. In fact, his ideas on the social order have already been subjected to bracing revision in his exposure to the young female professional, one of a team who attend to his uncle. Aware that ‘a “big” experience’ lies before him, he observes the ‘universal cleanness’ (IT, p. 75) around him, a virtue shared by Miss Mumby, a nurse, who with her ‘dazzling aura’ appears ‘more radiantly clean than he had ever known any vessel’ (IT, p. 76). Within his first ‘thirty hours in American air’ she reconstructs his Europeanized reading of class – ‘his pale old postulates as to persons being “such”’ (IT, p. 77). He is compelled to imagine her in a number of personal roles beyond the professional, as ‘youngish mother perhaps, a sister, a cousin, a friend, even a possible bride’. She invites him to have lunch ‘at which he foresaw in an instant that they were both to sit down’, and indeed she will conduct the meal as part of his cultural assimilation. ‘“I’m going

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to make you like our food, so you might as well begin at once”’, she announces (IT, pp. 78–9). Gray professes his commitment to ‘“everything”’ (within which he seems to include his new American life) as proportionate to his commitment to ‘waffles and maple syrup, followed, and on such a scale, by melons and ice-cream’. Distinctions of class, he realizes, are redundant; there will be ‘“thousands”’ of ‘“Miss Mumby’s”’, ‘“society thereby becoming clearly colossal”’ (IT, p. 80). In a comic combination of cultural and physical repleteness, Gray protests, in response to the nurse’s insistence that he must ‘“like everything”’, ‘“But I do, I do, I do”, with his mouth full of a seasoned and sweetened, a soft, substantial coldness and richness that were at once the revelation of a world and the consecration of a fate’ (IT, p. 81). Miss Mumby exercises a similar ‘freedom’ (IT, p. 82) with Dr Hatch who joins them, whom ‘she addressed rather as he had heard doctors address nurses rather than nurses doctors’. In this ‘breezy’ dining-room, Gray is initiated into his American future, having, as Miss Mumby points out, ‘“to wake up to some pretty big things”’ (IT, p. 81). Unlike the unquestioning, unseeing doctor of ‘A Round of Visits’ for whose attentions and disclosures Monteith longs, Dr Hatch, the ‘friendly physician’ and ‘delightful man’ (IT, p. 83), represents freedom and ‘its own rare freshness of note’, typifying contemporary egalitarian America. In embodying a ‘message or momentary act of quaint bright presence’ he offers direction for Gray’s future. In a scene on the veranda the young inheritor (escaping for the time his boyish form) seems translated into a god – in his selfless anticipation of an appointed future (the ‘consecration of a fate’), no less than Apollo himself. While Gray contemplates these ‘big things’, the doctor assures him that he will bring his uncle ‘“a lot of good”’. In this visionary enlightenment with its bracing mix of registers Gray assumes heroic proportions and, associated with light, sun and manly beauty, becomes a twentieth-century Phoebus Apollo. He looks on, while shining expanses opened, as an invitation to some extraordinary confidence, some flight of optimism without a precedent, as a positive hint in fine that it depended on himself alone to step straight into the chariot of the sun, which on his mere nod would conveniently descend there to the edge of the piazza, and whirl away for increase of acquaintance with the time, as it was obviously going to be, of his life (IT, pp. 82–3).

The doctor governs the timing of Gray’s introduction to his uncle’s sickroom and its ‘perfect proper moment’, so that the young man, like a classical hero granted divine powers by the gods, feels ‘some imponderable yet ever so sensible tissue, voluminous interwoven gold and silver, flung as a mantle over his shoulders while he went’. In these heightened hours representing ‘so high a tide of ease’, in which the prospect of a radiant American future transcends thoughts of impending mortality and is ‘read’ with ‘candid clearness’ (IT, p. 83), Gray is granted a figu-

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rative and typically late-Jamesian enlightenment, an antique, priceless volume to which he must simply and passively respond, ‘some presented quarto page, vast and fair, ever so distinctly printed and ever so unexpectedly vignetted, of a volume of which the leaves would be turned for him one by one’ (IT, p. 84). If the messages of the sky or air in The American Scene had appeared to the ageing James incoherent or menacing, the continent reveals its promises to young Gray Fielder with much greater clarity. When the more literal and informative accounts or ledger pages are turned for Gray in the days following his uncle’s death, he retains the innocence on which Mr Betterman has set such store and only wonders at such ‘boundless capital’ (IT, p. 233). He longs for Mr Crick, his uncle’s lawyer and ‘dryest of men’ (IT, p. 232), to berate him as ‘“the damnedest little idiot I’ve ever had to pretend to hold commerce with!”’ so that he may grovel and thus ‘placate the jealous gods’ (IT, p. 239). He supposes general opinion to regard him as ‘a creature rather unnaturally “quiet”’ in the knowledge of his ‘windfall’, a kind of rumour he fancies as a scene of the classical-baroque depicted in a Bernini fountain, or even as an image from a Keats lyric: ‘he couldn’t help almost seeing it as the spray of sea-nymphs, or hearing it as the sounded horn of tritons, emerging, to cast their spell, from the foam-flecked tides around’ (IT, p. 240). Gray’s idyllic future, conceived as benefiting the nation itself, will soon lose its innocence, and he will be corrupted by his old friend, Horton Vint, and Cissy Foy, who is ‘in a sort tied up with [Horton] … so far as she … has allowed herself to go in that direction for a man without money’ (IT, p. 292). James dwells indulgently upon the features of his young hero during an extended conversation between the two in Book III – when Gray’s role is already well established. Horton warns Cissy, banteringly, that Gray’s stepfather, who is now dead, may have formerly ‘worked’ her ‘up’ in her expectations of the young man, that she may not regard him, once seen, as ‘a provoker of passions’. Nevertheless the narrative pauses, as if reflecting James’s own ‘provoked passion’, his attention mediated through the semi-serious appraisals of the pair. Cissy recalls the charm of Gray’s innocence in an old photograph – ‘“I remember it … as a nice, nice face”’ (IT, p. 167) – and encourages Horton to update her on his friend’s appearance. She asks, ‘“Is he black, to begin with, or white, or betwixt and between? Is he little or big or neither one thing or t’other? Is he fat or thin or of ‘medium weight?”’ (IT, pp. 168–9), and Horton offers answers: ‘… I should call him black – black as to his straight thick hair, which I see rather distinctively “slick” and soigné – the hair of a good little boy who never played at things that got it tumbled. No, he’s only very middling tall; in fact so very middling tall’, Haughty made out, ‘that it probably comes to his being rather short’.

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She assures Horton that Gray cannot match his own ‘physical attractions’; ‘“you’re dazzlingly handsome”’ she tells him, but then asks, less reassuringly, ‘“but are you, my dear, after all – I mean in appearance – so very interesting?”’ (IT, p. 168) Gray, of course, falls short of conventional masculine values in appearance, like many of the young men in these later works. It is indeed their idiosyncrasies, their failure to live up to general stereotypes, often tenderly recorded, that delineate the contours of James’s own desire. The brusquely comic tone of Cissy’s interrogation – does he have eyes? Yes,‘“lots of eyes … Good eyes, fine eyes, in fact I think anything whatever you may require in the way of eyes”’ – allows the rapt examination of the male face to continue. She has only a few old photographs which at least indicate that Gray’s features are neither ‘mean nor common’, though she asks equivocally, ‘“what are photographs, the wretched things, but the very truth of life?”’ (IT, p. 170).14 Like those far-distant Civil War soldiers whom James never forgot, Gray is olive-skinned; as Horton comments, ‘“I think of him … as of a pale, very pale, clean brown; and entirely unaddicted … to flushing or blushing”’ (IT, p. 170). Yet Horton goes on to query Gray’s masculinity by suggesting that his teeth are ‘“good”’, though ‘“rather too small and square; for a man’s, that is”’. His opinion that ‘“they make his smile a trifle …”’ is interrupted and completed by Cissy: ‘“A trifle irresistible of course … through their being, in their charming form, of the happy Latin model … You’re simply describing, you know”, she added, “about as gorgeous a being as one could wish to see”’ (IT, pp. 170–1). Her gender frees her to speculate on Gray’s charms and to mark with appropriate modernity (she uses ‘gorgeous’ in a colloquial sense) the triumphant and shocking conclusion of even the idea of Gray’s Europeanized irresistibleness. At this point Horton reiterates his own masculine credentials: though he has provided the itemized commentary on Gray’s appearance, he quickly corrects what has become a general acceptance of the young man’s ‘gorgeousness’: ‘“It’s not I who am describing him – it’s you, love; and ever so delightfully”’ (IT, p. 171). Horton’s pointed, summarizing reminder, along with its patronizing endearment, attempts to recover his own conventional male role. Yet despite having conferred upon Cissy the responsibility for imagining Gray’s absent face, Horton himself raises an additional mystery concerning his friend, related (on the evidence of ‘A Round of Visits’) to masculinity and the desirability of the male – the question of whether he has a moustache: ‘“Does he, or doesn’t he after all, wear one?”’. The incomplete novel never resolves it, but the couple ruminate at length in that jocular, disbelieving manner which indicates a degree of Jamesian sexual anxiety. Cissy, in a dialogue which mixes affected French borrowings with Edwardian slang, is surprised that she cannot remember:

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‘It seems odd indeed I shouldn’t … Fancy my not remembering if the photograph is moustachue!’ ‘It can’t be then very’, Horton contributed – the point was really so interesting. ‘No’, Cissy tried to settle, ‘the photograph can’t be so very moustachue’. ‘His moustaches, I mean, if he wears ’em, can’t be so very prodigious; or one could scarcely have helped noticing, could one?’ (IT, p. 171).

The two even consult (partly to cover their confusion at being discovered together) Davey Bradham who lives in the neighbouring villa on the Atlantic Coast: ‘Has he, please, just has he or no, got a moustache?’ – she appealed as if the fate of empires depended on it. ‘I’ve been telling her’, Horton explained, ‘whatever I can remember of Gray Fielder, but she won’t listen to anything if I can’t first be sure as to that. So I want her enormously to like him, we both hang, you see, on your lips; unless you call it more correctly, on his’ (IT, pp. 174–5).

After that final and typically late-Jamesian play of words which adds an archaic sense of rapt attention to the idea of ‘hanging’ on lips, the couple receive no reply; a footnote indicates ‘a gap’ in the manuscript and James’s recorded intention to keep Davey ‘“non-committal”’. ‘“One sees that Davey plays with them”’ he observes to himself; thus by ducking these facile questions, it is planned that this ‘so perfect a man of the world’ will maintain ‘“the mystery or ambiguity or suspense about Gray, his moustache and everything else”’. It seems that the novelist is intent on protecting his hero’s unparalleled innocence, perhaps his other-worldliness, what, indeed, he means in his perfection to James himself, as these two ‘flagrant worldlings’ (IT, p. 175) casually contemplate his appearance.15 Certainly he needs no concealment of the kind that his old friend Horton Vint requires in helping to mask the unappealing worldliness of his nature. In defining contrast to Gray, his ‘hard mouth sported, to its visible relief and the admiration of most beholders, a beautiful mitigating moustache’ (IT, p. 154). Once again Cissy endorses Horton’s masculinity, or at least his moustache, as, beyond doubt, of a superior kind: ‘“Certainly no one can ever have failed to notice yours – and therefore Gray’s, if he has any, must indeed be very inferior”’ (IT, p. 171). In this fairly far-fetched series of conversations on what the moustache signifies, it seems that James is addressing aspects of specifically American male identity, imagining Gray’s future being enacted in the context of national male behaviours. The absence of a moustache can in Cissy’s eyes suggest minor criminality or simply a close-shaven, pervasively American absence of style: ‘“And yet he can’t be shaved like a sneak-thief – or like all the world here … I won’t have him subject to the so universally and stupidly applied American law that every

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man’s face without exception shall be scraped as clean, as glabre, [clean-shaven, smooth] as a fish’s – which it makes so many of them so much resemble”’. If Gray conforms to that national stereotype and proves himself ‘gregarious to that sort of tune’, she will abandon her cynical plan – or, as she points out, Horton’s – of snatching him ‘from the arms of Rosanna’. The ‘tune’ she refers to belongs to contemporary America, a society lacking, it is implied, in discrimination and decorum, ‘without that sense of differences in things, and of their relations and suitabilities’ (IT, pp. 171–2), of which Miss Mumby was a more savoury example. The money Cissy is so desperate to have is perhaps her only protection from such bland egalitarianism. When, soon after this, on his uncle’s death, Gray arranges an interview with Horton to request his help in dealing with his new fortune, it is significant that the question of his moustache receives no attention. It has perhaps served its purpose, having suggested Horton and Cissy’s superficiality, raised questions about Gray’s innocence and masculinity, and in its mystery helped preserve James’s private version of the hero. The scene between the young men excludes women and, in its mood, serves to extend the boundaries of conventional intercourse and mutual pleasure. Horton soon realizes that he himself is the influence bringing Gray to life, causing ‘the highly quickened state of the young blackclad figure’, seeing that ‘his own visit and his own presence had much to do with the quickening’ (IT, p. 185). Gray reveals to him that he has inherited ‘a most monstrous fortune’ and goes on to revel candidly in having such a friend: ‘“But the luxury of you, Haughty … the luxury, the pure luxury of you!”’. Horton is being offered much more than a post as financial adviser. Having received his fairy-tale-like inheritance, Gray makes him a form of proposal, in terms which mark an advance into a mutually sustained homoerotic intensity: ‘Something of beauty in the very tone of which, some confounding force in the very clearness, might it have been that made Horton himself gape for a moment even as Gray had just described his own wit as gaping’ (IT, pp. 189–90). That dumbstruck, open-mouthed silence at something wonderful, often involving an impression of male beauty, has fallen once again. The rapprochement with Gray fulfils a fantasy for Horton which he has already confided to Cissy, an excess of narcissistic pleasure as his own body is subjected to the exclusive and infatuated gaze of another man defined only by his wealth: ‘“the dream of my life has been to be admired, really admired, admired for all he’s worth, by some awfully rich man. Being admired by a rich woman even isn’t so good – though I’ve tried for that too, as you know, and equally failed of it”’ (IT, pp. 158–9).16 The excitement of the scene for Horton and Gray increases as each competes to outdo the other. The conventions of offering anything ‘smokable’ or ‘drinkable’ are overlooked, but quickly ‘the agitation of all that was latent … had presently broken through, and by the end of a few moments we might perhaps scarce have been able to say

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whether the host had more set the guest or the guest more the host in motion’ (IT, p. 190). The subject is financial planning on a grand scale; yet, as in ‘A Round of Visits’, the language and gestures of the episode point to sexual interplay. Gray, whose plans concern themselves with people and friendship rather than money, surrounds Horton with the ‘air of a prime social element’ (IT, p. 190), with his own ‘so suggestive revolutions’. James’s abstracted prose modifies itself into a medium of erotic possibility: whatever Horton had ‘presumed to care to know’ in friendship about Gray’s changed position, it will be ‘as naught beside the knowledge apparently about to drench him’. Beyond the emphatically tender physical gestures, the figurative terms compose a scene of willing acquiescence and abandonment. In this second meeting, or ‘brief arrest’, Gray offers Horton the irresistible, ‘everything good in the world that he might have conceived or coveted’, which, in a combination of pleasure and compulsion, will take on ‘the radiant form of precious knowledges that he must be so obliging as to submit to’. Once more, in sustaining a scene whose terms spell out erotic fascination, James intervenes, uneasily invoking the reader’s presence: ‘let it be fairly inspiring to us to imagine the acuteness of his perception during these minutes of the possibilities of good involved’ (IT, p. 191). Having submitted, Horton will be astonished by the easy, pleasurable release, through Gray’s ministrations, of mystery into overwhelming fulfilment and disclosure: ‘Wonderful thus the little space of his feeling the great wave set in motion by that quiet worthy break upon him out of Gray’s face, Gray’s voice, Gray’s contact of hands laid all appealingly and affirmingly on his shoulders, and then as it retreated, washing him warmly down, expose to him, off in the intenser light and the uncovered prospect, something like his entire personal future’. At this exclamatory climax Horton’s illumination leads him less into the self-centred marvels of his own future and more deeply into the acutest recognition (and beyond) of his friend’s demands, with each man again striving to out-satisfy the other, as James’s prose insists: ‘Something extraordinarily like, yes, could he but keep steady to recognise it through a deepening consciousness, at the same time, of how he was more than matching the growth of his friend’s need of him by growing there at once, and to rankness, under the friend’s nose, all the values to which this need supplied a soil’ (IT, p. 192). The proposal of rich employment is enacted as a moment of physical consummation. Horton, with a ‘record of failure’ (IT, p. 194) in his own career, continues to plead reluctance in helping develop Gray’s ‘capacity’ (IT, p. 197), after an exchange of looks of ‘some duration’ saying, ‘“My dear boy … you do take it hard”’. In ‘some vagueness of impatience’ and on ‘a blind impulse’ (IT, pp. 195– 6), Gray reaches for the cigarette box, in a gesture of homosocial companionship. In earlier years (1894), the young, nameless narrator of a short story, ‘The Death

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of the Lion’, who befriends the ailing novelist, Neil Paraday, had made a similar offer. As a junior hack, he had planned his visit, as James suggestively expresses it, to ‘“lay my lean hands on Neil Paraday … for he hasn’t been touched”’, to which his publishing ‘chief ’ has agreed: ‘“Very well, touch him”’. Having ingratiated himself with the ‘dear master’, the young man becomes flirtatious, a mood reciprocated with the exchange of a smile, and confirmed by the act of lighting a cigarette: ‘Oh, if you weren’t all right I wouldn’t look at you!’ I tenderly said. We had both got up, quickened by the full sound of it all, and he had lighted a cigarette. I had taken a fresh one, and, with an intenser smile, by way of answer to my exclamation, he touched it with the flame of his match.17

Interestingly, Percy Lubbock, the younger literary admirer who stood in some similar relation to James, undertook the posthumous publishing of The Ivory Tower (not to mention The Sense of the Past) and, aware of its incomplete state, as well as of the novelist’s preoccupation with revision, forestalled critical comment by referring the reader to a comparable situation in the same short story. Neil Paraday has left behind what the story describes as a ‘written scheme of another book’, a creative gesture described in typically romantic terms by James and quoted in the novel’s Preface: ‘Loose liberal confident, it might have passed for a great gossiping eloquent letter – the overflow into talk of an artist’s amorous plan’. Lubbock ends his Preface by applying to himself Paraday’s last ‘injunction’ to the story’s narrator that he should ‘“Print it as it stands – beautifully”’ (IT, p. vi). The mechanics of lighting cigarettes continue to carry a sexual signification in The Ivory Tower. Horton’s compliance, his anticipation of Gray’s needs, as well as the indulgence of his own are reflected in his ready completion of the transaction: without a word Gray thrusts a box of cigarettes at his friend, and (with some involved syntax) Horton’s ‘welcome of the motion, his prompt appropriation of relief, was also mute; with which he found matches in advance of Gray’s own notice of them and had a light ready, of which our young man himself partook, before the box went back to its shelf ’. The ‘lapse of speech’ between the two men marks their intimacy, though the self-consciously decorous summoning of the reader as they smoke together suggests, once more, a need to acknowledge the seeming deviancy of silence in their relationship: ‘Odd again might have been for a protected witness of this scene – which of course is exactly what you are invited to be – the lapse of speech that marked it for the several minutes’ (IT, p. 196).18 In this exclusively male chapter of the novel’s third ‘Act’ (as James referred to each of the ten planned Books) women are marginalized, even within the men’s dialogue; with a noted hint of disappointment in his friend, Gray dismisses Hor-

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ton’s suggestion that it might, with his wealth, be a ‘blessing’ were he to marry: as he says, ‘“it doesn’t meet my case at all”’ (IT, p. 199). Gray has locked away in the ornamental ivory tower the unopened letter he received from Rosanna Gaw’s now dead father; Horton can scarcely believe his friend’s simplicity (as he camply indicates) in not suspecting that its contents reveal that Mr Gaw has handed over to him his daughter: ‘“That hasn’t occurred to you before?” Horton asked – “nor the measure of the confidence suggested been given you by the fact of your receiving the document from Rosanna herself ? You do give me, you extraordinary person”, he gaily proceeded, “as good opportunities as I could possibly desire to ‘help’ you!”’ (pp. 215).19 In talking himself down by declaring his own untrustworthiness, Horton goes on to denigrate women even further, having reduced Gray ironically to feeling ‘palmed off ’ by his friend’s contention that ‘“women mustn’t in prodigious numbers ‘trust’”’ him (IT, p. 230). Horton’s embracing of a gender solidarity betrays a kind of sexual anxiety which echoes Oscar Wilde: ‘“What importance, under the sun, has the trust of women – in numbers however prodigious? It’s never what’s best in a man they trust – it’s exactly what’s worst, what’s most irrelevant to anything or to any class but themselves.”’ And he leaves with a command that might have been given by a doomed bachelor of Shakespearean comedy: ‘“So neither hate me nor like me, please, for anything any woman may tell you”’ (IT, p. 230).20 The exclusive bias of the narrative towards the body and experience of the male leaves women in peripheral roles as precarious observers or mother figures. Cissy Foy, the young woman Horton might have married, ‘earns her keep’ socially by her availability, ‘by multiplying herself for everyone … about the place … instead of remaining … single and possessable’ (IT, p. 43). Even Rosanna Gaw, who is herself sidelined and ridiculed from the beginning as ‘massive’, with ‘a vast pale-green parasol’ and draperies blown like ‘a ship held back from speed yet with its canvas expanded’ (IT, p. 1), feels misgivings about her friend which undermine in a single, brutal sentence the standing of both women: ‘Cissy had from the first appealed to her with restrictions, but that was the way in which for poor brooding Rosanna every one appealed’ (IT, p. 42). Though Horton and Cissy meet furtively and familiarly on the beach in Book III, their talk is full of Gray and his inheritance. She reports that Davey (a poor man who has married a rich wife) has already called on Gray in case of ‘“his possible want of a man to put a hand on. Because poor Rosanna, for all one thinks of her … isn’t exactly a man”’ (IT, p. 153). This toying with the cultural expressions of gender, the idea of whether a woman sometimes makes the better ‘man’, where knowledge, hard-headedness, or even dispassionateness act as defining signs of manliness, was fully rehearsed by James, of course, in his series of essays on George Sand.21 Horton counters Cissy’s sarcasm (admittedly two pages later) with a further swift querying of gender, offered ‘scarce in the least as a joke’: ‘“Rosanna is surely

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enough of a man to be much more of one than Davey”’ (IT, p. 155). Whatever the gender of the man one might be tempted ‘to put a hand on’, he should have, Horton suggests, if not power, at least financial substance. The prevalent view of this incomplete novel as principally expressing James’s revulsion at the vulgarity and excessive wealth of twentieth-century American society tends to accentuate the negative, representing James as overly Europeanized and squeamish. His renewed American experience and its assault on the senses acted in a more private dimension to provide insights into male subjectivity and the intimate pleasures of homosocial candour, and to imagine a future (constructed on impossibly romantic lines) characterized by cleanliness and which holds limitless promise. At least in the completed stages of the novel James is able to imagine a nation which, in its potential, may accommodate the future of an innocent young man. This slight young hero who almost evades description in the weight of speculation as to his virtues, is waited for, watched and admired in many of the novel’s scenes, an object of desire for men at least as much as for women. Gray Fielder, his virtue rewarded, belongs to fairy-tale, as the narrative itself acknowledges, as if at this late, indeed last stage, James feels freed to develop a fantasy which transforms the hard-headed material success of business sucked up ‘through a thousand contorted channels’ (IT, p. 328) into a bottomless pot of gold granted to a favoured young prince. His – or even ‘our’ – ‘Young Man’ (IT, pp. 328, 332) is obliged to wonder at the ‘strange deposits of money’, the ever-renewing capital of wealth, held in New York institutions, ‘like familiar mountain masses’ which have appeared ‘on the blue horizon … till they fairly overhung him with their purple power to meet whatever drafts upon them he should make’. However concerned James might have initially been at his own ignorance of the terms or operation of business, he could chart the imaginative and moral impact of Gray’s inheritance, ‘the extraordinary blank cheque’ and the ‘figures, monstrous, fantastic, almost cabalistic, that it seemed to him he should never learn to believe in’ (IT, p. 232). It is only after ‘repetition’ that this ‘sort of thing … fairytale enough in itself ’ eventually becomes an ‘experience comparatively vulgar’ (IT, p. 233). In the part of the novel never completed James intended to touch upon (in contrast with Gray’s wondrous simplicity) what he calls, in Blake-like terms, ‘the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions’ (IT, p. 287) and the ‘ugliness of his inheritance’ (IT, p. 332). Horton’s criminality will not be one ‘vulgar theft’, but ‘a whole train of behaviour, a whole process of depredation and misrepresentation’ (IT, p. 287), so that his friend will be shocked at the corrosive effects of materialism and the pursuit of money. This added ‘beautiful difficulty’ will lead Gray to see Horton ‘as “dishonest” in relation to others over and above his being “queer” in the condoned way I have so to picture for his relation to Gray … Horton is abysmal, yes – but with the mixture in it that Gray

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sees’ (IT, p. 332). Horton’s disappointing moral deviancy, his ‘queerness’, in duping a trusting friend, goes further than simply taking advantage of a man who, in his distaste for his inheritance virtually invites Horton, ‘led on and encouraged’ (IT, p. 287), to take it. Gray may have appeared as the ‘utterly queer, and helpless and unbusiness-like, unfinancial, type’ (IT, p. 282) when the two meet up after a space of years, but Horton’s queerness threatens the fabric of human relations. It is redeemed only by the determination of Gray ‘on his part simply to show the other in silence that he understands, and on consideration will do nothing’ (IT, pp. 287–8). As James considers twentieth-century America and ponders its dedication to the acquisition of wealth, he continues (as he had in ‘A Round of Visits’) to express a trust in the exercise of imagination and in generous gestures which have their source in homosocial loyalty. These private activities, however brave or pleasurable, constitute a response to the nightmarish condition of vulgarity diagnosed by James as nationwide, though their field of operation in the exchanged intimacies of predominantly male affection establishes a subversive presence within that fearsome society.

Notes to pages 1–6

211

NOTES

1 Letting Yourself Go 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

The Sacred Fount (London: Macmillan, 1901, 1923), p. 42. Future references are given in parentheses in the text. A relatively early and fictionalized portrait of James himself, in which he also acts as a mentor in art history, with scenes set in Florence and the Pitti Palace, survives in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s ‘A Florentine Experiment’, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, 46 (1880), pp. 502–30. See, for instance, David McWhirter, who suggests that James, in the extent of his involvement with its production, signals ‘his conviction that the Edition could provide a valid image or synecdoche for his large and diverse oeuvre, and by implication for himself and his life as an artist’ (‘Introduction’ to David McWhirter (ed.), Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 6). The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1920), vol. I, pp. 1–2. Life, vol. II, p. 621. They are the writings which postdate what F. O. Matthiessen, referring to The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, famously labelled the ‘Major Phase’. His favoured title, The Return of the Native, which Thomas Hardy had already claimed, indicates this more personal emphasis (see HJL, vol. IV, p. 328). HJL, vol. IV, p. 286. Ross Posnock sees Strether’s ‘prolonged ordeal of vulnerability and trauma simultaneously painful and exciting’ in Paris as rehearsing James’s own ‘year of repatriation’ in America (The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James and the Challenge of Modernity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 234). See The Ambassadors, ed. Harry Levin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 117. It is pointed out, with some irony, that ‘He was Lambert Strether because he was on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like glory, that he was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether’ (p. 115). Ross Posnock suggests a tradition for the flâneur: ‘The stylistic triumph of The American Scene is James’s discovery of a form of cultural analysis that mimes the dissonant rhythms of his radical curiosity, which in turn feeds on shocks, contingencies, and the transitory attractions of urban minutiae. James’s “traumatophobia” not only recalls Baudelaire’s flaneur but also anticipates Walter Benjamin’s celebration of this mode of being in his

212

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

Notes to pages 6–10 essays on Baudelaire as the emblematic figure of modernity’ (The Trial of Curiosity, p. 22). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sees the bachelor who has ties with the Bohemian demi-monde first found in Thackeray’s fiction (one of James’s favourite authors) as a forerunner of the flâneur (Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. 193). For the portrayal of the type in nineteenth-century art, see Alexander Sturgis, Rupert Christiansen, Lois Oliver and Michael Wilson, Rebels and Martyrs: the Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century (London: National Gallery/Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 119–37. Jerome Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 84. Ibid., p. 86. Donald E. Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 149–50. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1891), 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1907), vol. II, p. 336. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 43. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 2. Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 1. For James’s observations on Wilde and Symonds, see Eric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 59–64. For James’s ‘loathing’ of Wilde, see Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 128–32. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 206 (author’s italics). Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York and London: Norton, 1999), p. 329. James found his own portrait completed in 1912 by the eminent John Singer Sargent to be ‘awesome’. John Carlos Rowe usefully wishes to replace this ‘awesome’ impression with a much more familiar figure of postmodern sensibility: ‘The Jameses we discover in his place are anxious, conflicted, marginal, sometimes ashamed of themselves, utterly at odds, it would seem, with the royal “we” that James assumed in his last deathbed dictations, slipping in and out of Napoleonic delusions’ (The Other Henry James (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1998), p. xiii). John R. Bradley, Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence (London: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 16–19, 20–2. James would later refer to a ‘colossal multiplication of divinely naked and intimately associated gentlemen and ladies’ in a letter to the sculptor of 31 May 1906 (HJL, vol. IV, p. 405). Andersen recalls ‘Un ragazzo di notevole intelligenza e carattere che era solito trascorrere ogni sabato – il suo giorno di vacanza dalla scuola – nel mio studio facendo barchette o leggendomi qualcosa mentre ero al lavoro. Ero fortemente attirato da lui, nonostante la nostra differenza di età, e un grande affetto nacque tra noi. Berto aveva perduto suo padre e sentivo che aveva bisogno di attenzione e guida. Ero solito portarlo con me in giro per Roma a visitare le chiese e le gallerie di pittura e lo iniziavo ai grandi capolavori dell’arte, notando con piacere con quale sveltezza imparasse ad apprezzare la loro bellezza e a disprezzare la pochezza degli artisti meno bravi’ (Elena di Majo, Il Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen (Turin: Edizioni Sacs, 2001), p. 21). (‘A boy of remarkable intelli-

Notes to pages 10–16

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

213

gence and character who had been accustomed to spend every Saturday – his only day off school – in my studio making little boats or reading me something whilst I was working. I was strongly drawn to him, despite the age difference, and a great affection was born between us. Berto had lost his father and I felt that he needed attention and guidance. I was accustomed to take him with me around Rome to visit churches and picture galleries and introduced him to the great masterpieces of art, noting with pleasure with what ease he learnt to appreciate their beauty and to scorn the limitations of lesser artists’ [my translation].) There is a terracotta copy of the bust at Villa Helene, home of the Museo Hendrik C. Andersen, now part of Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna. 13 April 1914; quoted in Virginia Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950), p. 345. Letter to Margaret La Farge, 21 August 1914, in John LaFarge [sic], ‘Henry James’s Letters to the LaFarges’, New England Quarterly, 22 (1949), p. 173–92; p. 192. Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), p. 4. Quoted in Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992), p. xv, entry for 25 December 1908; Theodora Bosanquet’s diary is held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Letter to Mrs James, dated 29 July 1889, Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1920), vol. I, p. 288. Quoted in Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, p. 9. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990, 2006), p. 11. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 62. Judith Halberstam, ‘Female Masculinity’ (1998), rpt in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds), Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 935–56; p. 936. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Shame and Performativity: Henry James’s New York Edition Prefaces’, in McWhirter (ed.), Henry James’s New York Edition, pp. 206–39; pp. 215– 16. Review of Correspondance de C-A Sainte-Beuve (1878), rpt in LCF, p. 681.

2 Surrendering to the Messages of New York 1.

2.

3.

For the remarkable architectural and technological changes in the city during the ‘gilded age’ (1865–90), see Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman, New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999). In his youth James had found it, ‘under pressure of the American ideal in that matter’, ‘tasteless’ and ‘humiliating’ that his father ‘was not in business’. Business included the ‘respectability’ of the law, medicine and religion: ‘I think if we had had the Pope among us we should have supposed the Pope in business’ (Aut, p. 278). Mary Esteve regards the ‘highly eroticized and entangled web of desire’ of this scene as benefiting by contrast from James’s established role elsewhere, though her characterization is open to query: ‘His self-fashioning throughout The American Scene as a solitary traveler, as celibate and impersonal – as, in effect, promiscuously anerotic – contributes to the dispersive and entangling erotics of the New York crowd scene’ (‘Anerotic Excursions: Memory, Celibacy, and Desire in The American Scene ’, in Peggy McCormack (ed.), Questioning the Master: Gender and Sexuality in Henry James’s Writings (Newark,

214

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

Notes to pages 16–24 DE: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Press, 2000), pp. 196–216; p. 210). ‘To a Stranger’, in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York and Cambridge: Library of America, 1982), p. 280. See also, from the ‘Calamus’ group of poems, ‘Are you the new person drawn toward me?’ (p. 277) and ‘A Glimpse’, with its ‘crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night’ (p. 283). Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (London: Cape, 1961), p. 331. Washington Square (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), ch. 3, p. 16. Alan Trachtenberg believes that such experiences are emblematic of the ‘feelings of loss and betrayal and fear’ caused by change and illustrated ‘almost everywhere in American literature’ (‘The American Scene: Versions of the City’, Massachusetts Review, 8 (1967), pp. 281–95; p. 294). Howard M. Feinstein, ‘The Use and Abuse of Illness in the James Family Circle: A View of Neurasthenia as a Social Phenomenon’, in Robert J. Brugger (ed.), Our Selves / Our Past: Psychological Approaches to American History (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 228–43; p. 228. Carol Holly, Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1995), p. 8. A similarly rapturous if disquieting hotel scene of affluence and material wealth occurs near the beginning of ‘A Round of Visits’ when the hero, Mark Monteith, threads ‘the labyrinth, passing from one extraordinary masquerade of expensive objects, one portentous “period” of decoration, one violent phase of publicity, to another: the heavy heat, the luxuriance, the extravagance, the quantity, the colour, gave the impression of some wondrous tropical forest, where vociferous, bright-eyed, and feathered creatures, of every variety of size and hue, were half smothered between undergrowths of velvet and tapestry and ramifications of marble and bronze’ (CT, vol. XII, p. 431). Mark Seltzer has influentially regarded James’s interpretation of the ‘hotel world’ as reflective of the features of his own discourse: ‘If James reenacts the policies of the hotelworld, this world reiterates and reenacts his own policies of aesthetic form. The perfectly stable equilibrium of the hotel is also a model of perfect formal economy and organic unity … Incorporating the normative and the organic, the hotel is a triumph of form, of the Jamesian imperative of organic regulation’ (Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 113). The hotel description quoted from ‘A Round of Visits’ in n. 10 above could well be regarded as alluding to James’s own late style. Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity, p. 247. A term used by Jerome Bruner to suggest how we may wish to change the mood of, or hypothesize on, ‘the self-evident declaratives of everyday life’ (Making Stories, p. 11). Elsewhere James in comic and self-deflating mood objects to ‘the hustled and hoisted state’ imposed by ‘the great religion of the elevator’, and its insisting on ‘gregarious ways’ as the ‘human bunch’ is invited to ‘“step lively”’ (AS, pp. 186–7) through its doors. Sara Blair, in Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), with great insight discusses and reproduces examples of the contemporary ‘reform’ photography of Lewis Wickes Hines (pp. 164–78). There are, incidentally, two fleeting references to this technology in ‘Crapy Cornelia’; the narrative invokes its instantaneous facility and surmises what the expression on

Notes to pages 24–9

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

215

White-Mason’s face might have looked had he been ‘“snap-shotted” on the spot’ and later imagines his own change of focus in a moving-picture technique. He fails to notice on their first remeeting the unfashionable Cornelia, with her ‘little sparsely-feathered black hat … that grew and grew, that came nearer and nearer, while it met his eyes, after the manner of images in the cinematograph’ (CT, vol. XII, pp. 339, 343). Ross Posnock, ‘Affirming the Alien: The Pragmatist Pluralism of The American Scene’, in Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 224–46; p. 236. The Bowery, ‘a boulevard cutting across Manhattan’s Lower East Side, had been from the 1830s the site of an active working-class cultural life. Dotted with theatres, saloons, dance halls, dime museums – plus a vibrant and sexualised street life – the Bowery became a keyword for a commercial and largely masculine working-class culture, a public culture Whitman participated in and often celebrated in his poetry’ (Robert K. Nelson and Kenneth M. Price, ‘Debating Manliness: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Sloane Kennedy, and the Question of Whitman’, American Literature, 73 (2001), pp. 497–524; p. 500). Sara Blair’s reading quotes from Jacob Riis’s innovative 1890 study of urban life, How the Other Half Lives: ‘“[L]ined with theatres, music-halls, saloons and retail shops”, the Bowery can be simultaneously advertised as a virtual laboratory for the making of new Americans and a site for exploration of pleasures “of the cheaper order”’ (Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation, p. 183). Cf. Kenneth W. Warren’s comment on John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York, Atheneum, 1981) and its accuracy ‘in finding in The American Scene a patrician “pessimism” and a “eulogistic” tone on behalf of the passing of Anglo-Saxon ideals. At any rate, James’s contribution to the discourse of race in America is at best ambivalent’ (Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago, IL, and London: Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 21–2). A decade later, in the last months of his life, James himself, after forty years’ residence in Britain, became, as an American citizen, an ‘alien’, a private irony within the onslaught of the Great War. His status allowed him, of course, to nullify the designation. In a public gesture which seems to mix elements of a Savoy opera with classical tragedy he pledged his allegiance to what had become a homeland engaged in a war whose end he would not live to see. Having been, as he says, ‘under observation of the police’, he sought naturalization, engaging with personnel of the most thorough British credentials, advised by his solicitor, Nelson Ward, an illegitimate relative of Horatio Nelson, and having as one of his sponsors Prime Minister Herbert Asquith (HJL, vol. IV, pp. 760–3). William Boelhower suggests that James here engages ‘the central category of the monocultural (Americanizing) paradigm, which by 1904 had become a categorical imperative … he chooses to upset the paradigm’s lexicon by using the pincers of quotation marks around the key words (“American” and “ethnic”) and in this way both defamiliarizes them and suggests that their conventional status is historical rather then ahistorical’ (Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 24–5). Aside from its semantic field of conjuring, ‘abracadabra’, a cabalistic term, can also signify gibberish or jargon. With typical inventiveness, James incorporates it within his own syntax by using the French, participial form. Though see below, Chapter 5, p. 70. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, p. 308. CN, p. 241. Other American journals seem not to have survived (see CN, p. 234).

216

Notes to pages 32–40

3 Boston and Cambridge 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

‘The Social Significance of our Institutions’, 4 July 1861, JF, p. 60. James had spent a misguided year there at the start of the Civil War, purporting to study law. The eminent black writer W. E. B. Du Bois, who held a Harvard PhD and had been a student of William James, wrote The Souls of Black Folk, a work referred to in The American Scene (p. 418). William Wetmore Story and his Friends, 2 vols (London: Thames and Hudson, n.d.), vol. I, p. 38. Emma Lazarus, ‘The New Colossus’, in Poems of Emma Lazarus, 2 vols (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889), vol. I, p. 202. ‘The present enclosure of the Yard began to take shape at the end of the nineteenth century … It was very largely achieved during the early years of the twentieth century, though the final enclosure of the east side and northeast corner was not completed until 1936 … During the later nineteenth century, the Yard had been enclosed by a fence of square granite posts connected with two or three square wooden rails. Such a post and rail fence still encloses a triangular grass plot at the southeast corner of the Yard …’ (Mason Hammond, ‘The Enclosure of the Harvard Yard’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 31 (1983), pp. 340–83; pp. 346, 348). When, in The Bostonians, Verena Tarrant and Basil Ransom visit ‘the great university of Massachusetts’ the space is ‘reserved by means of a low rustic fence, rather than inclosed (for Harvard knows nothing either of the jealousy or the dignity of high walls and guarded gateways)’ (The Bostonians (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 207). See The Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 12 vols (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992), vol. I: William and Henry: 1881–84, p. 113. See Elizabeth Prettejohn, Interpreting Sargent (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1998), pp. 61–3. Sargent’s portrait of James (1913) hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery. This fact was of great significance to the subject himself, as he recorded in a speech (which still retains something of his style) given at the Associated Harvard Clubs in Cincinnati in 1909: ‘Let me give one further illustration, which makes me choke every time I think of it. It is purely egotistical. When the students were trying to get money for a portrait of myself to put in the Harvard Union, they went around and asked for it of the various men in College. (I want you to understand that the students paid for that portrait and put it there. They asked John Sargent to paint it, and he did.) One of the men who was looking for money came to College House where the poor fellows live, and asked: “Is there anybody upstairs here?” He was told there was a chap up in the attic, but that he had no money. He went up, looked in the door, and found the man cooking supper at the fireplace. He drew back and shut the door behind him. But the man came after him and said, “What do you want?” – “I don’t want anything”. – “Yes, you do, you came for something; what did you come for?” – “Well”, said he, “some money for that portrait”. The man said, “Well, here, I have got thirty-two cents. I am going to-night to the wharf for work; I will give you twenty-five cents”. Can any of you do better than that, gentlemen? That fellow was paying twenty-five cents out of the thirty-two cents to paint a portrait of me, because he thought he wished to do it. (Applause.) If we have men of that sort, if men come there and go through college by working at night on the wharves as that man was doing – we are all right!’ (quoted in Bliss Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson (Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921), pp. 358–9n.).

Notes to pages 40–5

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

217

Higginson was a celebrated philanthropist, not only in endowments to Harvard College, but also in supporting other social and cultural causes, having founded, for instance, in 1881, the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He also had close connections with the James family, having been a friend of Wilky and William James, becoming William’s financial adviser and later acting as a pall-bearer at his funeral held in the Appleton Chapel at Harvard on 30 August 1910. The Major’s brother, Francis, had served with Wilky in the 54th Massachusetts (information derived from R. W. B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (London, André Deutsch, 1991), pp. 163n., 583). The portrait is now seen by ‘every freshman en route to meals’ (Carol Troyen, ‘Sargent and Major’, ‘John Harvard’s Journal’, Harvard Magazine, 1 (May–June 1999), www.harvardmagazine.com/issues/mj99/jhj.sargent.html [accessed 15 January 2004]. I am indebted to this short essay for other items of detail). Higginson had preferred his military rank title ever since the Civil War, when he was invalided out of the Union army having sustained in June 1863 a serious injury in a skirmish at Aldie Gap in Virginia (see Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson, p. 194). Adeline Tintner has suggested that this portrait may have influenced James’s description of the protagonist’s alter ego at the climax of the short story of this period, ‘The Jolly Corner’, whose expatriate hero returns to New York and is horrified at the changes to the city. This ghostly figure has a mutilated hand, with two fingers missing: ‘perhaps a footnote to the Higginson portrait, in which fingers of the left hand are summarily painted’ (The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), pp. 97–8). However this seems an unusually arcane reference especially in light of the powerful effect that the mutilation has within the narrative. More pertinent perhaps (though unavailable to any more innocent reader of the tale) is James’s language on realizing that his old house in Washington Square has been demolished and replaced and his sense ‘of having been amputated of half my history’ (AS, p. 91). In contrast, one might recall that Higginson had aspired to be a concert pianist until he damaged his hand, which was then incompetently treated. The Sargent portrait does not identify any physical disablement of a hand. Its reputation at the time may have been less assured. William calls Higginson ‘as liberal hearted a man as the Lord ever walloped entrails into. His portrait by Sargent, a vast thing, destined for the “Union” building which he gave to the College, is esteemed a bad failure – I haven’t seen it’ (letter to Henry James, 3 May 1903, The Correspondence of William James, vol. III: William and Henry, 1897–1910, p. 235). The Bostonians, p. 210. See also Lewis, The Jameses, pp. 160, 360. Disagreeing with Leland S. Person in Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), who regards Ransom as here repossessing ‘man’s brutality’ (p. 116), Susan M. Ryan regards the scene as ‘more about communion than combat; it represents a utopian, if unsustainable, form of affective engagement’ (‘The Bostonians and the Civil War’, Henry James Review, 26 (2005), pp. 265–72; p. 269). ‘Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields’, Atlantic Monthly ( July 1915) and Cornhill Magazine ( July 1915), rpt in LCA, pp. 160–76; p. 172. See below, Chapter 8, pp. 115, 136. For one interpretation of the James–Wendell Holmes relationship which caused some controversy on its appearance, see Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Young Master (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 109–10. A letter of 16 July 1911, written to Wendell Holmes whilst James was in America, reveals the complexity and continuing affection of their relationship. The novelist had received an honorary degree from Harvard on 28 June; Holmes had given an address on ‘The Class of ’61’ for which James seemingly could not stay: ‘I ask myself frankly today, dear

218

16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

Notes to pages 45–7 Wendell – or rather, still more frankly, ask you – why you should “feel a doubt” as to whether I should care to see you again and what ground I ever for a moment gave you for the supposition that the “difference in the sphere of our dominant interests” might have made “a gulf that we cannot cross”. As I look back at any moment of our contact – which began so long ago – I find myself crossing and crossing with a devotedness that took no smallest account of gulfs, or, more truly, hovering and circling and sitting on your side of the chasm altogether (if chasm there were!) – with a complete suspension, as far as you were concerned, out of the question of any other side. Such was my pleasure and my affection and my homage – and when and where in the world did you ever see any symptom of anything else? However, I don’t put this question as a challenge – I rejoice too much in your letter, and am deeply accessible to any gentle approach or appeal, to any reference to old memories, communities and pieties. I should say these things live for me again – if my irrepressible, incorrigible, almost intolerable imagination had ever let them die! Take it from me that I am so far from not caring to see you again that it shall be my lively endeavour to do so before I sail’ (Mark DeWolfe Howe (ed.), ‘The Letters of Henry James to Mr. Justice Holmes’, Yale Review, n.s. 38 (1949), pp. 410–33; p. 431. He recalls an earlier, more distant occasion of ‘an autumn walk, in funereal alleys’, when he had come across statues in the Memorial Chapel at Mount Auburn commemorating Theodore Parker (friend of Emerson) and Judge Story, father of William Wetmore Story (William Wetmore Story and his Friends, vol. I, p. 23). Soldiers’ Field, on the Boston side of the Charles River, had been bought for Harvard by Henry Lee Higginson, the subject of Sargent’s portrait, in 1890. There is an inscription in stone in front of the Locker Building, with lines by Emerson, listing names known to the James family (including Robert Shaw, the colonel of the Massachusetts 54th, the regiment with which Wilky James had served in the Civil War): ‘To the happy memory of James Savage, Jr, Charles Russell Lowell, Edward Barry Dalton, Stephen George Perkins, James Jackson Lowell, Robert Gould Shaw, Friends, Comrades, Kinsmen, Who died for their country, This Field is dedicated by Henry Lee Higginson. “Though love repine and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply, – ’Tis man’s perdition to be safe, When for the truth he ought to die”’ (quoted in Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson, p. 332). In a moving letter of typically Jamesian sensitivity on 20 July [1891] to the dying Lowell – ‘Your non-arrival – this spring – made me for the first time in my life willing to say that I “realised” a situation. 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’ – James also refers to Whitby: ‘the little house in the lane with the view of the Abbey through the loophole in the barn – or whatever it was – and the religious rite of your coffee-making to usher in the summer’s day’ (HJL, vol. III, pp. 346–7). Referred to in The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947; Galaxy, 1961), p. 315n. James has ‘Dopo lungo exilio e martiro / Viene a questa pace –’. Alice James, Her Brothers, Her Journal, ed. Anna Robeson Burr (London: Macmillan, 1934), p. 246. Alice, of Henry: ‘Within the year he has published The Tragic Muse, brought out The American, and written a play, Mrs Vibert (which Hare accepted), and his admirable comedy: combined with William’s Psychology, not a bad show for one family! – especially if I get myself dead, the hardest job of all’ (ibid., p. 234).

Notes to pages 48–57

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23. A mood evocatively captured by W. H. Auden; he asks if he may not ‘especially bless’ the man ‘Who opened such passionate arms to your Bon when It ran / Towards you with its overwhelming reasons pleading / All beautifully in Its breast?’ (‘At the grave of Henry James’, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1976), p. 242). 24. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in a celebrated insight, offers this moment as ‘an invocation of fisting-as-écriture’ (‘The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic’ in Ruth Bernard Yeazell (ed.), Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 186, rpt in Epistemology of the Closet). In discussing James’s creativity in relation to ‘his own anal eroticism’, she offers examples of other ‘intertexts’ in ‘Shame and Performativity’, p. 223. Michael A. Cooper offers an interesting comment on James’s eroticizing of the acts of reading and writing: ‘That James should attribute such intensely erotic sensations to the mere apprehension of text and that he should characterize these in terms of religious ecstasy are typical of his most intimate mode of human interaction’ (‘Discipl(in)ing the Master, Mastering the Discipl(in)e: Erotonomics in James’s Tales of Literary Life’, in Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden (eds), Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 66–83; p. 68). James elsewhere imagined artistic creation in almost geological terms so the imagery of penetration and retrieval may modify without diminishing a solely sexual emphasis. In the dictated and incomplete fragment, ‘The Turning Point of my Life’ he remarks of his output, ‘It is well enough to talk, overflowingly, of the things one had thrown off and that seem so to have ceased to be part of oneself; but real bliss of publication, I make out, must be for those one has kept in – that is if they have at all richly accumulated and are too tightly packed to be gouged out (or, to put it more delicately, too shy or too proud to consent to be touched)’ (CN, p. 438). Edel and Powers give the date of this piece as 1900–1, though in her extended analysis (published earlier than their volume) Carol Holly convincingly indicates that it was written at the beginning of 1910 and interrupted by James’s illness (‘Henry James’s Autobiographical Fragment: “The Turning Point of my Life”’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 31 (1983), pp. 40–51; p. 40). 25. For James’s fictional allusions to this tale, see below, Chapter 6, pp. 82–3 26. See, Henry James: The Young Master, p. 109; and Bradley, Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence, pp. 19–20.

4 Asking ‘as few questions as possible’ in Arcadian New England 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Bruner, Acts of Meaning, pp. 109–10. See The American Scene, ed. John F. Sears (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 347. See, incidentally, William W. Stowe, ‘“Oh, the land’s all right!”: Landscape in James’s American Scene’, Henry James Review, 24 (2003), pp. 45–56; for other aspects of Arcadian allusions as well as gender terms in relation to landscape, see pp. 49, 52. James refers to Goldsmith’s ‘turn for pathos’ in a very early essay on ‘The Novels of George Eliot’, Atlantic Monthly (October 1866), rpt in LCA, p. 915. Its national credentials are endorsed by Whitman’s poem on the death of Lincoln, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’. Named, incidentally, as a place to exemplify humankind’s attraction to water at the opening of Moby Dick. The ‘magnificent elms’ of Northampton, Massachusetts, are mentioned in Roderick Hudson, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1883), vol. I, p. 27.

220 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

Notes to pages 58–70 This is now the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington. Letter to Grace Norton, recording William James’s death, 26 August 1910, HJL, vol. IV, p. 559. The American Scene, ed. Sears, p. 344. The Bostonians, p. 298. James had spent a weekend here, over twenty years earlier (in the summer of 1883), with Richard Gilder and his wife. Gilder was editor of the Century, the magazine in which The Bostonians appeared as a serial. Some late and decisive scenes (including Miss Birdseye’s death) occur in Marmion, a fictitious village on Cape Cod (with a fleeting reference to the Sir Walter Scott poem), based on Marion overlooking Buzzards Bay (see also Life, vol. I, p. 684). The city was the first to show a tangible interest in Impressionism as well as Asian art. The Museum of Fine Arts bought Degas’s Race Horses at Longchamp in 1903; the sugar merchant heir John Taylor Spaulding (1870–1948) was a major collector of Japanese woodblock prints. See Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005), pp. 24–5. 18 November 1904, HJL, vol. IV, p. 334. She herself, of course, became a part of this house-building plutocracy: The Mount at Lenox in the Berkshires, was, he wrote to Howard Sturgis, ‘an exquisite and marvellous place, a delicate French château mirrored in a Massachusetts pond (repeat not this formula)’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 325). William Wetmore Story and his Friends, vol. I, pp. 16–17; vol. II, p. 178. See also below, Chapter 8, pp. 131–2. Letter to Grace Norton, 26 September [1870], HJL, vol. I, pp. 245–6. See also Peter Collister, ‘Levels of Disclosure: Voices and People in Henry James’s Italian Hours’, Yearbook of English Studies, 34 (2004), pp. 194–213; p. 204. See below, Chapter 7, pp. 101–2. Preface to New York Edition, vol. XVII: The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace and other Tales, rpt in LCF, p. 1250. Long before, in a letter of 21 September 1869, James had compared the light of Venice to that of Newport: ‘Newport, by the way, is extremely like it in atmosphere and color; and the other afternoon, on the sands at the lido, looking out over the dazzling Adriatic, I fancied I was standing on Easton’s beach’ (LaFarge, ‘Henry James’s Letters to the LaFarges’, pp. 179–80. His wife was the eminent American Impressionist painter of landscapes and portraits Lilla Cabot Perry, who had strong associations with Monet (see Impressionism Abroad, pp. 88–9, 137).

5 Hearing the Voices of the South 1. 2.

Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (London and New York: Macmillan, 1902), p. 2. Having left New York on 31 March 1865 in a group led by Professor Louis Agassiz, William James, had watched ‘a thick drifting dark cloud … It was smoke billowing up from the centre of Richmond, Virginia, set afire by Confederate troops fleeing the capital city, by gangs of looters, and by men who had broken out of prison’ (Lewis, The Jameses, p. 172). Incidentally, Oliver Wendell Holmes published in the Atlantic Monthly (November 1865) a semi-comic poem, ‘A Farewell to Agassiz’, celebrating his departure on this expedition; the Civil War is characterized as the ‘monstrous reptile’ (see Kendall John-

Notes to pages 70–9

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

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son, ‘“Dark Spot” in the Picturesque: The Aesthetics of Polygenism and Henry James’s “A Landscape Painter”’, American Literature, 74 (2002), pp. 59–87; p. 87n. Dedicated in May 1890, one of a series of historic statues on Monument Avenue. Owen Wister, Lady Baltimore (New York and London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 17. Future references are given in parentheses in the text. Eric Haralson, ‘The Person Sitting in Darkness: James in the American South’, Henry James Review, 16 (1995), pp. 249–56; p. 255n. The shocking cracks-running-throughporcelain sentence was used, incidentally, as the basis for one of the illustrations in the first edition of Lady Baltimore. Warren, Black and White Strangers, pp. 21–2; Warren quotes from Boelhower’s Through a Glass Darkly. Gert Buelens offers a useful summary of interpretations by Sara Blair, Ross Posnock and Kenneth Warren of the extent to which James took ‘a firm stand on the question of Jim Crow racism’ in ‘Possessing the American Scene: Race and Vulgarity, Seduction and Judgment’, in Gert Buelens (ed.), Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 166–92; pp. 169–73. The unusual image of the reaching hand is reminiscent of the notebook reference to his accessing of his own creative resources, regarded as a form of ‘fisting’ by Eve Sedgwick. It illustrates at least the figurative link for James between the creative and the erotic. Wister was himself influenced by James’s style in Lady Baltimore; though his editor, George Brett, pronounced ‘the subject new and its treatment superb, he cautiously suggested that Wister “look out about some phrases which sound like Henry James”’. Wister read aloud the novel’s opening chapters to James: ‘“Look here”, Wister naïvely said upon finishing, “while I was reading my stuff aloud, Augustus [the novel’s narrator] now and then sounded remarkably like you. That’ll never do”. James … responded pleasantly, “Well, my dear Owen, may I in all audacity and sincerity ask what could Augustus better sound like?”’ (quoted in Darwin Payne, Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), pp. 234, 235). Some of the contemporary notices of the novel also picked out this indebtedness. Kemble, Journal of a Residence, p. 37. It seems difficult (however tempting) to read the scene as a Jamesian re-enactment of ‘the polarized positions that had pertained at the time of the Civil War, and in which his brothers had participated with manful action’ (Buelens, ‘Possessing the American Scene’, p. 180). HJL, vol. IV, pp. 233, 234. Maggie Verver, incidentally, in The Golden Bowl, shows her familiarity with the genre of the Western: wanting to look ‘as little dangerous’ as possible to Charlotte, she keeps her book in view, reminding herself of ‘people she had read about in stories of the wild west, people who threw up their hands, on certain occasions, as a sign they weren’t carrying revolvers’ ((Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 509). To Edith Wharton, 16 January 1905, HJL, vol. IV, p. 342. For fuller discussion of invalidism in young American men, see below, Chapter 11, pp. 184–5. Letter to Edmund Gosse; quoted in Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James, p. 279. Cf. Richard Dellamora: ‘I do not recall a single moment of self-recognition in … the complex history of his friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson’ (review of John R. Bradley (ed.), Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 54 (1999), pp. 113–16; p. 114). ‘Miss Woolson’, Harper’s Weekly (1887), rpt in LCA, pp. 640–1. Letter to Edmund Clarence Stedman; quoted in Rayburn S. Moore, Constance Fenimore Woolson (New York: Twayne, 1963), p. 22.

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Notes to pages 79–84

17. Woolson prefaced the tale in book form with some lines from Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a man also known to James who had become a Bostonian and editor of the Atlantic Monthly: When we remember how they died, – In dark ravine and on the mountain-side, In leaguered fort and fire-encircled town, And where the iron ships went down, – How their dear lives were spent In the weary hospital-tent, In the cockpit’s crowded hive, – it seems Ignoble to be alive! 18. ‘Miss Woolson’, p. 649. 19. Lyndall Gordon describes their relationship as a series of ‘hopes, promises, loneliness and mutual care, friction and reunions’. She regards, incidentally, the paragraph in ‘Miss Woolson’ (removed for later publication in Partial Portraits (1888)) which covers the writer’s life as ‘a calculated betrayal’ (A Private Life of Henry James, pp. 253 and 213). . 20. Haralson, ‘The Person Sitting in Darkness’, p. 253. It had been unseasonably cold and James had been suffering with gout as well as having trouble with his teeth.

6 ‘Unwritten history’ 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

For James’s fetishizing of this wound as a token of national solidarity, see below, Chapter 7, p. 103. For details see Life, vol. I, pp. 149–51. The event is mentioned by all of James’s biographers; Colm Toibin (author of the James-based novel, The Master) suggests that ‘it is eminently possible that “the obscure hurt” James spoke about in his memoirs was a conspiracy between him and his mother, who had invented a disability, a strange backache for him. This allowed him to stay in his room reading and gave him the freedom not to fight’ (‘The Haunting’, Daily Telegraph (London), 13 March 2004). In discussing Basil Ransom’s involvement in the war in The Bostonians, Evelyne Ender regards the detail of James’s account of his wounding as hinting at ‘a mechanism of conversion and male hysteria’, holding ‘in the home the feminine of the lady hysteric expecting a rest cure’, though she is concerned ‘not to come to a diagnosis’ (Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 123). See Charles and Tess Hoffmann, ‘Henry James and the Civil War’, New England Quarterly, 62 (1989), pp. 529–52. Using contemporary local sources they conclude that ‘The exemption [from the draft] … freed him from any personal anxieties he may have had concerning his own individual relationship to the war’ (p. 552). Charles Perrault, Les Contes de Charles Perrault (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1875), pp. 117–19. Jonathan Freedman, ‘Introduction: The Moment of Henry James’, in Cambridge Companion to Henry James, p. 4. James contributed to a volume entitled Favorite Fairy Tales: The Childhood Choice of Representative Men and Women (HJL, vol. IV, pp. 446–7, and note by Leon Edel). See Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 171.

Notes to pages 84–7 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

223

Quoted in Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James, p. 15, who also points out that another early story, ‘Gabrielle de Bergerac’ (1869), is based on a Doré illustration for Perrault’s ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ (pp. 15–18). ‘Ralph Waldo Emerson’, Century Magazine ( June 1883), rpt in LCA, p. 239. See also JF, pp. 459–60. March 1864, HJL, vol. I, p. 50. James is writing to T. S. Perry, an old childhood friend, which may explain the vein of self-mockery. It is perhaps significant that there is no mention of the Civil War nor of his younger brothers’ participation in this selection of letters for these years (though the reasons may be editorial). ‘The Story of a Year’ was James’s first signed story, appearing in the Atlantic Monthly, 15 (March 1865), pp. 257–81. As he innocently comments elsewhere, ‘I am grossly ignorant of military matters, yet … I am always very much struck by the sight of a uniform’, ‘a severe case’, as Peter Rawlings points out, ‘of what was popularly known as “scarlet fever”’ (‘The British Soldier’ (1878); quoted in Peter Rawlings, ‘Grotesque Encounters in the Travel Writing of Henry James’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 34 (2004), pp. 171–85; p. 182). Within his fiction more generally, ‘James delights in positioning his male characters in such ways that their gender and sexual orientations are reversed, ambiguous, and even multiple’ (Leland S. Person, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, p. 14. See also Michèle Mendelssohn, ‘Homosociality and the Aesthetic in Henry James’s Roderick Hudson’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 57 (2003), pp. 512–41. Roderick Hudson, vol. I, pp. 31, 62. For this legitimizing process, see also Wendy Graham, who suggests that ‘the excitement produced by homosocial intimacy gets vented through heterosocial channels’ (Henry James’s Thwarted Love (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 104). See his 1865 review of Drum-Taps, rpt in LCA, pp. 629–34. See, for instance, a comment in Alice James’s journal: ‘H says that WH has had a most brilliant success in London, and that he was as pleasant as possible, young-looking, and handsomer than ever, – flirting as desperately too. I suppose that his idea of “heaven” is still “flirting with pretty girls”, as he used to say’ (Francis Biddle, Mr. Justice Holmes (New York: Scribner’s, 1943), p. 74). Life, vol. I, p. 190. Edel may be recalling in his language Holmes’s Memorial Day Address of 1884, a phrase from which – ‘through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire’ – provided the title for Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, 1861–4, ed. Mark DeWolfe Howe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), p. v, though the term, ‘fire-eater’ was, of course, current during the Civil War period. The sentiment suggests the permanent divide between combatants and non-combatants. Compare too Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s description of an acquaintance as ‘a man one part flesh and three parts fire’ (Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson 1846–1906); quoted by E. Anthony Rotundo as an example of the ‘Masculine Primitive’, one of three categories of middle-class, North East Coast males (‘Learning about Manhood: Gender Ideals and the Middle-Class Family in Nineteenth-Century America’, in J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (eds), Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 35–51; p. 41). This is doubtless less significant than it may seem in our age: on a planned visit from Newport by Henry to his brother William in Cambridge, the former is warned that, like his younger brother Wilky he may have to share a bed; the suggestion is accompanied

224

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

Notes to pages 87–99 by a comic illustration (see The Correspondence of William James, vol. I, p. 4), and the practice extended beyond family members. Letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes, 14 July [1865], HJL, vol. I, p. 60. Howe (ed.), ‘The Letters of Henry James to Mr. Justice Holmes’, p. 414. Edel suggests (Life, vol. I, p. 183) that the tale is set in 1863 – but McClellan had been removed from his post as general-in-chief of the federal armies as early as March 1862, returning home to New Jersey at the end of the year, never to be recalled. Alfred Habegger attributes the tale’s hostile view of Lizzie Crowe to the fact that while revising the story James was reviewing Anne Moncure Crane’s Emily Chester and attacking the heroine’s ‘psychological infidelity’ (Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’, p. 171). His badly injured brother Wilky was invalided home from South Carolina in late summer 1863; Henry kept William’s pencil sketch of Wilky’s head pressed against a pillow, looking at it again when he died in 1883. The other female in the story, Mrs Ford, takes on a similar marble-like character when Lizzie greets her on return: she ‘felt as if she were embracing the stone image on the top of a sculpture’ (CT, vol. I, p. 90). CT, vol. X, p. 63. See also Person, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, pp. 139– 43; and ‘Homo-Erotic Desire in the Tales of Writers and Artists’, in John R. Bradley (ed.), Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 111–23; p. 116. Life, vol. I, p. 193. For the source of this ‘emanation’, see below, Chapter 7, pp. 104–5. For the characteristics of this category, derived from the influences of Fenimore Cooper, tales of Davy Crockett and the lives of native Americans which had become popular before the Civil War, see Rotundo, ‘Learning about Manhood’, p. 48. Donald J. Mrozek sees ‘the western frontier as a testing ground for manly vigour and as a crucible of military and Victorian idealism. The “wilds”, even along the eastern seaboard, had long been taken as a special preserve for men, in which they might at least briefly escape the complexities of relationships with women’ (‘The Habit of Victory: The American Military and the Cult of Manliness’, in Mangan and Walvin (eds), Manliness and Morality, pp. 220–41; p. 226). The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Cambridge and Boston, MA: Mifflin, 1882), p. 387. Habegger, Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’, pp. 170, 171. Howard Feinstein, Becoming William James (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 233. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 208n.

7 ‘Doing something’ for the Soldiers of the Civil War 1. 2. 3.

Preface to the New York Edition of The American, rpt in LCA, p. 1058; James here refers to looking again at ‘the shrunken depths of old work’. For further detail see Lewis, The Jameses, pp. 130–5. For William’s account of this day, his being wrongly referred to in the New York Times as brother of a Major James who died in battle, his accompanying Saint-Gaudens, the pathos of the surviving veterans who attended, ‘the last wave of the war breaking over Boston, everything softened and made poetic and unreal by distance’, see his letter of 5 June 1897, The Correspondence of William James, vol. III, pp. 8–10. For his address Wil-

Notes to pages 99–101

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

225

liam relied heavily upon Wilky’s ‘The Assault on Fort Wagner’, one of the War Papers read before the Commandery of the State of Wisconsin, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, vol. I: 1891 (see ibid., p. 3n.). Saint-Gaudens’s impressions also survive: ‘The regiment that came nearest to us, virtually at the head of the procession, comprised the remaining officers and colored men of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, whom Shaw had led; the bas-relief itself being within thirty or forty feet of where the colors were presented to them by Governor Andrew, before Colonel Shaw started on the march to his death. At the unveiling there stood before the relief sixty-five of these veterans. Some of the officers were clad in the uniforms they had worn during the Civil War, and rode on horseback. But the negro troops … came in their time-worn frock-coats – coats used only on great occasions. Many of them were bent and crippled, many with white heads, some with white beards, some with bouquets, and, the inevitable humorous touch, one with a carpet-bag … The impression of these old soldiers, passing the very spot where they had left for the war so many years before, thrills me even as I write these words. They faced and saluted the relief, with the music playing “John Brown’s Body”, a recall of what I had heard and seen thirty years before from my cameo-cutter’s window. They seemed as if returning from the war, the troops of bronze marching in the opposite direction, the direction in which they had left for the front, and the young men there represented now showing these veterans the vigor and hope of youth. It was a consecration’ (The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, ed. Homer Saint-Gaudens, 2 vols (New York: Century, 1913), vol. II, pp. 80–3). Letter to William James, 25 February 1897, The Correspondence of William James, vol. III, p. 5. Saint-Gaudens had considerable difficulty with the composition of the relief, with the clay, with the countless legs and feet of the infantry and their military accoutrements. His son, Homer, recalled that ‘the flying figure drove my father nearly frantic in his efforts to combine the ideal with the real’. The horse, bought expressly for the project, was ridden by the sculptor for exercise, but later died of pneumonia contracted while having a cast made of him. The black models ‘ranged in character from a gentle Bahama Islander to a drummer-boy who, while posing for the figure in the foreground, told me how he had just been released from prison, where he had gone for cutting his brother with a razor’. The sculptor had to enlist his brother-in-law’s help in engaging more black models: ‘At Young’s Café, in your great City of Boston, there are two gorgeous darkeys, so gorgeous that I wish to put them in the Shaw monument’; he asks him to approach the head waiter: ‘if you will step in there and get him to ship me these two beauties at once you will be eternally blessed … I’ve got lots of others here, lots, but none such busters’ (Reminiscences, vol. I, pp. 343, 333, 335, 337–8). For the mythic national status of this encounter and the poetry it engendered see Lewis, The Jameses, pp. 140–4. ‘William C. Russel [sic] never found his son, who had been killed in action, because Cabot Russel, Robert Shaw (colonel), and all other Union dead, black and white, had been thrown into a common, unmarked grave by the Confederate soldiers’ (Hoffmann and Hoffmann, ‘Henry James and the Civil War’, p. 550). James spells Russell with two l’s, while the listing of the Civil War dead in Harvard’s Memorial Hall gives the name with a single l. For James’s ‘playful and experimental’ account of his ‘gender and sexual identification’ in Notes of a Son and Brother, see Person, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, p. 7.

226 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

Notes to pages 103–12 For further detail see Life, vol. I, pp. 145–54; and Hoffmann and Hoffmann, ‘Henry James and the Civil War’, p. 534. James visited the wounded of World War I in London from 1914 (e.g., see CN, p. 409). ‘Gus Barker was picketing the Rappahannock with three hundred men when he was shot by a sniper behind the lines near Kelly’s Ford, Virginia. He died the next day, 18 September, at the age of twenty-two’ (Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James, p. 61). James was seemingly ignorant of the detail, enquiring of Sarge Perry the name of the Cavalry regiment to which Gus belonged, his rank, and how he met his death – whether ‘on some skirmish, small raid or almost accidental encounter’ (letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry, 17 September 1913, HJL, vol. IV, p. 684). He asks Perry to look him up in the Harvard Memorial Biographies, and also needs confirmation of information about his brother Bob and his regiment. Such crimes will, of course, invite a homosocial, ‘gentlemanly’ affection in some of James’s latest fiction, for example, ‘A Round of Visits’ and The Ivory Tower, discussed below. Many years earlier, whilst staying in London, Alice James seems equally hostile; on 22 November 1884 she writes to her aunt, Catharine Walsh: ‘why did you let Charlotte King loose upon me, I have had two notes already from her inviting me to stay in Versailles, it is all owing to Wm. [brother William]’ (The Death and Letters of Alice James, ed. with biographical essay Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1981), p. 94). Though Frank Harris briefly transformed the Saturday Review for four years. According to John Gross, Harris alleged, incidentally, that Henry James had disagreed with him about the Fortnightly Review, its editor, John Morley, and ‘high Victorian journalism generally’. The generally unreliable Harris recorded that ‘James said to him, “I regard Mr Morley and Mr Leslie Stephen as the first men of letters in England”, to which he replied crushingly that, on the contrary, they were uncreative mediocrities, “only hodmen and incapable of conception”. Whether anything remotely resembling this exchange ever in fact took place we shall never know …’ (The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life since 1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 111). Michael Moon interestingly notes the significance and even the fetishistic associations of the location: ‘The Paris of the Second Empire was the most formative setting of James’s childhood according to his own testimony, and it is a principal setting of “The Pupil”. The bourgeois culture of this period may be said to have had its own intense velvet fetish. According to Walter Benjamin in his study of Baudelaire, bourgeois domestic interiors at the latter end of the period had become velvet- and plush-lined carapaces for a social class that seemed to want to insulate itself from the world from which it derived its wealth and power behind a grotesque barrier of such luxury fabrics’ (‘A Small Boy and Others: Sexual Disorientation in Henry James, Kenneth Anger, and David Lynch’, in Hortense J. Spillers (ed.), Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 141–56; pp. 149–50). See below, Chapter 12, pp. 195–9.

8 Life-Writing for the Man of Letters 1.

The composite title of Autobiography was conferred by F. W. Dupee, but it has not seemed appropriate to everyone. Lyndall Gordon points out that James ‘did not call it an autobiography and it might more appropriately be termed a memoir. It is not really categorisable’ (A Private Life of Henry James, p. 374). On the other hand, F. W. Dupee

Notes to pages 112–17

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

227

rightly described his title as ‘the least misleading of several possibilities. Neither “Memoirs” nor “Reminiscences” will do for a work which is so subjective, so purposeful, and so well-organized’ (Aut, p. x). For a possible original of M. Ansiot, John Carlos Rowe refers us to the researches of Pierre Walker in ‘From France in James to James in France’, a paper delivered at the Henry James Society panel on ‘Internationalizing Henry James’, MLA convention of 1996. James’s tutor may have been the magnificently named M. Napoléon Ansieaux: ‘The significance of Walker’s research is that the young James is called to the vocation of novelist in the international site of Boulogne and with the encouragement of a French rhetorician passionately committed to the importance of literature in the organization of social life. Yet both Boulogne’s “cosmopolitanism” and Ansiot’s (or Ansieaux’s) literary idealism are ironized by James in his recollections: the former as a sort of English tourism and the latter as a sort of literary quixotism’ (The Other Henry James, p. 139). Bruner, Making Stories, p. 83. The Principles of Psychology, vol. II, pp. 332, 333. Ibid., vol. II, p. 291. Ibid., vol. II, pp. 334–5. Edwin G. Boring; quoted in Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 99; see also p. 107. For James’s revisions of Minny Temple’s letters see Alfred Habegger, ‘Henry James’s Re-Writing of Minny Temple’s Letters’, American Literature, 58 (1986), pp. 159–80. Tamara Follini was unable to examine the fifteen letters of Wilky James and seven of the thirty-four letters of Henry James, Senior, included in Notes of a Son and Brother, but discovered that ‘all of the remaining letters in the book have been revised’ (‘Pandora’s Box: The Family Correspondence in Notes of a Son and Brother’, Cambridge Quarterly, 25 (1996), pp. 26–40; p. 35). David McWhirter regards the New York Edition of his Collected Works as James’s real autobiography (Desire and Love in Henry James: A Study of the Late Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 18). See also above, Chapter 1, p. 3. Making Stories, pp. 85–6. Michael Millgate, on the other hand, regards James, in his epistolary revisions, as ‘a monster of egotistical voracity’ (Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 93. Paul de Man (1979): ‘autobiography lends itself poorly to generic definition’ (quoted in Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. vii). Ibid., p. xxiii. Ibid., p. ix. Bruner, Making Stories, p. 14. Henry James to Louise Corrin Walsh, 23 June 1913, Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1999), p. 526. For a detailed analysis of James’s use of family letters, see Holly, Intensely Family, pp. 109–13. Henry James to William’s widow, Alice Howe Gibbens James, 13–19 November 1911, Henry James: A Life in Letters, p. 504. Tamara Follini suggests that James excluded Alice because there were no extant letters, thus avoiding falling into what he called ‘the terrible fluidity of self-revelation’: ‘By this logic … if a portrait of Alice had to be jettisoned because of the absence of letters, one of his cousin Minny Temple, by the acquisition of her correspondence, could be added’

228

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

Notes to pages 117–22 (‘Pandora’s Box’, p. 31). In fact, James had already completed his portrait of Minny before her letters arrived, thus risking – or maybe inviting – that ‘terrible fluidity’. Jean Starobinski, ‘The Style of Autobiography’, trans. Seymour Chatman, in James Olney (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 78; quoted in James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago, IL, and London: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 272. Cf. Haralson: ‘By extension [regarding his reading of James’s short story, ‘The Pupil’], [Christopher] Isherwood concurred with such readers as Spender, Forster, and André Gide that James’s coy, often involuted prose constituted an obscure form of flirtation in its own right’ (Henry James and Queer Modernity, p. 21). The Letters of Henry James, vol. II, p. 300. See below, Chapter 9, p. 139. ‘Fun’ as the energetic exercise of imagination over a lifetime is a typically Jamesian understatement. In that late vindication of the benefits of revision in the Preface to The Golden Bowl, the author, James asserts, must weave ‘so beautifully tangled a web’ created from his ‘re-perusal’: ‘The ideally handsome way is for him to multiply in any given connexion all the possible sources of entertainment – or, more grossly expressing it again, to intensify his whole chance of pleasure. (It all comes back to that, to my and your “fun” – if we but allow the term its full extension; to the production of which no humblest question involved, even to that of the shade of a cadence or the position of a comma, is not richly pertinent)’ (Preface to the New York Edition of The Golden Bowl, rpt in LCF, p. 1338). Even here James feels moved to include a minor revisionary amendment, a ‘grosser’ expression. For a consideration of the moustache and its erotic potential, see below, Chapter 12, pp. 202–4. Later in life James considered and finally decided against writing a book on Dickens in the ‘Men of Letters’ series to which he contributed the volume on Hawthorne (the first American to be included in the collection). Thackeray called to him ‘“Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket!” My sense of my jacket became from that hour a heavy one – further enriched as my vision is by my shyness of posture before the seated, the celebrated visitor, who struck me, in the sunny light of the animated room, as enormously big and who, though he laid on my shoulder the hand of benevolence, bent on my native costume the spectacles of wonder. I was to know later on why he had been so amused and why, after asking me if this were the common uniform of my age and class, he remarked that in England, were I to go there, I should be addressed as “Buttons.”’ In the early Mathew Brady daguerrotype of James taken with his father he is wearing this jacket. The celebrated visitor feigned horror at Alice’s appearance as a ‘little flounced person’ (she was just eight): ‘“Crinoline? – I was suspecting it! So young and so depraved!”’ (Aut, p. 52). James refers here to Thackeray’s ‘own expressive hand’, but earlier in his career is fairly disparaging about the novelist’s drawing technique, which seems to ‘have almost as little skill as might be; even for an amateur it is exceedingly amateurish’ (‘William Makepeace Thackeray’, Nation, 9 December 1875, rpt in LCA, p. 1286). William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes (1855), 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder, 1879), vol. II, p. 372. Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811–46 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 134, 230.

Notes to pages 123–8

229

30. That sense of speaking for the dead would (as I mention above) land James in some trouble with his nephew and William’s son, Harry, when, without consultation, he amended and rewrote some of William’s letters for publication: the act of revision suggests a psychological as well as an aesthetic need for James, especially at this time of completing the New York Edition of his fiction. For the family repercussions see HJL, vol. IV, pp. 793–804; JF, pp. 107–9; William Hoffa, ‘The Final Preface: Henry James’s Autobiography’, Sewanee Review, 77 (1969), pp. 277–93; and Follini, ‘Pandora’s Box’, pp. 26–34. For the revisions of the New York Edition see David McWhirter, ‘“The Whole Chain of Relation and Responsibility”: Henry James and the NewYork Edition’, in McWhirter (ed.), Henry James’s New York Edition, p. 7. 31. Preface to the New York Edition of The Wings of the Dove, rpt in LCF, p. 1291. 32. Joseph Litvak discusses interestingly ‘the scenic “intensities” of this narrative passage [which] epitomize the interpenetration of stage and page in virtually all of James’s works, and the extent to which it partakes of both consciousness and unconsciousness of both craft and “witch craft”’ (Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley, CA, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 211–12). 33. Letter to Louise Corrin Walsh, 23 June 1913, Henry James: A Life in Letters, p. 526. 34. ‘De Grey: A Romance’, rpt in CT, vol. I, pp. 398–9. 35. Interestingly, Alice was reading a volume of Emily Dickinson’s in January 1892 (she would die on 6 March), specifically the poem, ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – Too?’. ‘“What tomes of philosophy”, she asked, “resumes the cheap farce or expresses the highest point of view of the aspiring soul more completely than the following – ‘How dreary to be somebody How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!’”* *Alice inscribed this stanza as Higginson [the editor] presented it, after removing Emily Dickinson’s dashes and characteristically dimming the third line, which rightly reads: “To tell one’s name – the livelong June –”’ (Lewis, The Jameses, p. 477). Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a New England abolitionist, an older cousin of Henry Lee Higginson (whose portrait by Sargent James admired at Harvard) who, in the Civil War, had been Colonel of the First South Carolina regiment, a volunteer corps of men of African descent. According to Richard Ellmann, he was ‘a highly respected bore’ (Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 174). 36. John Pilling suggests that ‘the imagery of doors is very common in late James often … in the context of multiplying impressions’ (Autobiography and Imagination: Studies in SelfScrutiny (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 81). 37. James writes in similar terms to Edward Emerson and his recalling of Newport days and his parents on 4 August 1914: ‘I rejoice to hear from you that you are feeling yourself moved to call up some of the beloved old ghosts, & can wish you nothing better than to feel in doing so, even as I have been feeling, with what heart-breaking gratitude & confidence they come. They only want to & ask to – they hold out such answering hands, & there isn’t a service they can render us that they don’t seem to me to look their unspeakably touching delight at being able to perform’ (Henry James: A Life in Letters, p. 542). 38. Preface to the New York Edition of The Golden Bowl, rpt in LCF, p. 1331. 39. See Litvak, Caught in the Act, p. 33.

230

Notes to pages 129–32

40. The failure of their enterprise was by no means uncommon at the time. The eventual Boston benefactor, Henry Lee Higginson, went ‘hunting oil in Ohio’ and tried ‘cottonraising in Virginia’ with great hard work but little success just after the Civil War before returning to the family firm in New England (Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson, pp. 247, 266). 41. In James’s finding of a unique and American ‘tone’ in Hawthorne’s writing at this time, Richard Brodhead suggests that the ‘passage as a whole hints more darkly that James does not so much follow Hawthorne as replace him, implying as it does a link between James’s metaphorical birth as an artist and Hawthorne’s literal death’ (The School of Hawthorne (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 122). 42. Henry James ( Junior), Hawthorne (London: Macmillan, 1879, 1887), pp. 45, 44. 43. Ibid., pp. 182–3. The Pemigiwasset Hotel had been built only in 1862, just four years after the opening of the Boston, Concord, Montreal Railroad. Overlooking the Pemigiwasset River, the hotel and the railway station burned down in 1909. 44. ‘An indication of Newport’s European accent is that La Farge’s friend John Bancroft, who arrived on the scene in 1863, preferred to discuss painting in French, which he considered more precise than English in its artistic vocabulary’ (Henry Adams, ‘The Mind of John La Farge’ in Henry Adams, Kathleen A. Foster, Henry A. La Farge, Barbara Weinberg, Linnea H. Wren and James L. Yarnall, John La Farge: Essays (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1987), pp. 10–77; p. 19). The town was at this time unpretentious and quite shabby, but ‘following the Civil War the social life of Newport, which had been rather simple and restrained for more than a half a century, suddenly expanded and became much more sophisticated. The city gradually lost much of its southern clientèle and became the summer playground for wealthy northern families’ (Rhode Island, American Guide Series, p. 212; quoted in Robert C. LeClair, Young Henry James 1843–70 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1955), p. 412n.). 45. The affection remained. On 26 December 1902, James wrote to Mary Cadwalader Jones, ‘If La Farge is within hail, please tell him that I feel the loss of him, always, as one of the greatest pangs of my long exile’ ( James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; quoted in Adams, ‘The Mind of John La Farge’, p. 17). 46. Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl hopes for ‘a sip of independence’ ‘with the last salmoncoloured French periodical’ (p. 455) whilst the rest of her uneasy family play bridge at Fawns. James’s ‘trusty friend’ (p. 487) from early Newport days, T. S. Perry, records how ‘We read the English magazines and reviews and the Revue des Deux Mondes with rapture’ (LeClair, Young Henry James, p. 282). 47. Fromentin’s study of Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, Les Maîtres d’Autrefois, was reviewed by James in an essay of 1876 written for the Nation, republished in The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry James, ed. with intro. John L. Sweeney, foreword Susan M. Griffin (Wisconsin, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 1989), pp. 116–21. It was in fact John La Farge who ‘discerned in the youthful Henry James’ the ‘painter’s eye’ (p. 9). Many years later La Farge recorded his admiration for Les Maîtres d’Autrefois, assessing it as ‘by far the most perfect of essays in the criticism of the art of painting’ (‘Art and Artists’, International Monthly, 4 (1901), p. 336; quoted in Adams, ‘The Mind of John La Farge’, p. 68). Ironically the faults James finds with Fromentin anticipate the negative responses to his own late style: ‘his whole dissertation is a good example of the vanity of much of the criticism in the super-subtle style. We lay it down perplexed and bewildered, with a wearied sense of having strained our attention in a profitless cause’ (The Painter’s Eye, p. 118). In this piece he also admires ‘the charming

Notes to pages 132–4

48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

54.

231

novel of Dominique’ for its ‘art of analysing delicate moral and intellectual phenomena’ (p. 116). More broadly, the paintings of Henri Regnault, who has much in common with Fromentin in terms of execution and subject (he also spent time in North Africa before his premature death in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War), were admired by James. He had admired one of La Farge’s Newport paintings in an 1872 review of ‘French Pictures in Boston’ for the Atlantic Monthly, ‘the view of a deep seaward-facing gorge, seen from above, at Newport … in every way a remarkable picture, full of the most refined intentions and the most beautiful results, of light and atmosphere and of the very poetry of the situation’ (The Painter’s Eye, p. 49). At this time when the Hudson River school was most popular, La Farge’s Newport watercolours were considered revolutionary, showing ‘many of the most forward-looking features of French art’ (Adams, ‘The Mind of John La Farge’, p. 71). The 1862 portrait is justly famous. Understandably less well known is the beautifullyexecuted oil painting of James’s younger brother Wilky, of 1859–60, who was fourteen at the time (‘Portrait of a Seated Boy’, held at the Denver Art Museum). An unfinished 1865 pencil sketch of T. S. Perry also survives from this period (in the Frances S. Childs collection); La Farge married Perry’s sister, Margaret, in 1860. La Farge completed ‘Paradise Valley’ in 1866–8 – ‘a picture of peculiar significance in the history of American art’ (Royal Cortissoz, John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study (Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), pp. 127–8) – but it seems likely that James is referring to ‘The Last Valley – Paradise Rocks’ of 1867–8, painted in the Paradise Hills, not far from La Farge’s Newport home. The Bostonians, p. 331. James would reassert the unity of painting and narrative’s capacity to represent in a late essay: ‘The most fundamental and general sign of the novel, from one desperate experiment to another, is its being everywhere an effort at representation – this is the beginning and the end of it’. ‘To the art of the brush the novel must return, I hold, to recover whatever may be still recoverable of its sacrificed honour’ (‘The Lesson of Balzac’; quoted in The Painter’s Eye, p. 9). The accolade is reminiscent of the question Turgenev, James’s favourite Russian writer and friend of his Parisian days, asked himself: ‘Am I capable of anything big and calm?’; quoted in ‘Introduction’ to On the Eve, trans. Gilbert Gardiner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950, 1972), p. 12. After the death of his brother James remained in America until the summer of 1911. John La Farge died in November 1910 and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts mounted a major retrospective, the ‘La Farge Memorial Exhibition’, 1–31 January 1911, showing oil paintings, watercolours, drawings and one stained-glass window ( James L. Yarnall with Amy B. Werbel, ‘Major Exhibitions and Sales’, in Adams et al., La Farge, pp. 246–8; p. 247); this must be the ‘commemorative cluster’ (Aut, p. 296) to which James refers. Though he doesn’t mention them, it is likely that James saw two of La Farge’s stainedglass windows in the chilly ‘castle of enchantment’ in which he stayed en route from Richmond to Charleston during his 1904–5 trip to the US recorded in The American Scene (see pp. 396, 478n.). The vast château-style Biltmore House, the home of George Vanderbilt, in Asheville in the North Carolina mountains, contains two triptychs by La Farge: the aptly named Fruits of Commerce and Hospitalitas/Prosperitas. James had previously stayed with Henry Adams in Washington where a fellow guest was La Farge who had been accompanied by Adams on his trips both to Japan and the South Seas in the previous decade (see Life, vol. II, p. 578).

232

Notes to pages 134–9

55. The letter relating these events seems ambiguous. James refers to having ‘received from J.[ohn] G.[ray], through … Alice at Cambridge, that packet of Minnie’s letters of long ago, which, setting his affairs in order in these days of his own very impaired health & vitality, he asked Alice to read as preliminary to sending them to me (to do what I would with,) rather than bring himself to destroy them’. He then recounts Alice’s reading them ‘with intense interest & emotion’ and saying ‘at once “Do, do let me send them to Henry!”’ – a question which seems redundant given Gray’s earlier recorded intention (letter to Henrietta Temple Pell-Clarke (Minny’s youngest sister), 5 May 1914, Henry James: A Life in Letters, p. 537). Gray died in 1915. 56. AS, p. 59. See above, Chapter 3, p. 38. 57. Henry James: A Life in Letters, p. 537. 58. Letter to William James, 29 March 1870, The Correspondence of William James, vol. I, p. 155. For a more severe judgment, see Alfred Habegger: ‘This idea – that Minnie was so alive she was better off dead, that continued life would have brought only agony or anguish – became one of those fixed formulas that James repeated again and again … The relief James found in Minnie’s death strikes me, without qualification, as inhumane and sinister’ (Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’, pp. 144, 145). 59. Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 77. 60. Alfred Habegger, ‘Henry James’s Re-Writing of Minny Temple’s Letters’, p. 162. Before sending to James Minny’s letters offered to her by John Gray, Alice James (his sisterin-law) made copies of them which are now held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Having used them extensively in Notes of a Son and Brother James destroyed the originals before his death. Habegger prints a short passage not contained in Alice’s extant copies but appearing in Notes of a Son and Brother: ‘This climate is trying to be sure, but such as it is I’ve got to take my chance in it, as there is no one I care enough for, or who cares enough for me, to take charge of me to Italy, or to the south anywhere. I don’t believe any climate, however good, would be of the least use to me with people I don’t care for’ (p. 176). For a number of reasons relating to an increased emphasis in James’s other amendments on Minny’s sense of neglect and isolation Habegger concludes that this is the novelist’s ‘own composition’. Gordon, in A Private Life of Henry James, p. 395n., contends that Alice James suppressed it and that ‘the passage in question is written in Minny Temple’s authentic voice’, but this view assumes that James was incapable of escaping from the ‘more formal and measured rhythm of [his own] late style’, seemingly forgetting that he was, above all else, a professional writer. In the absence of any confirming evidence it seems more likely that Habegger is right and that James invented it. 61. Letter to Henry Adams (no date given, but written after completing Notes of a Son and Brother); quoted in Hoffa, ‘The Final Preface’, p. 283.

9 ‘An influence beyond my notation’ 1. 2.

See HJL, vol. IV, p. xxii. Ross Posnock, ‘Breaking the aura of Henry James’, in McWhirter (ed.), Henry James’s New York Edition, pp. 28–38; p. 37, who also includes the quotations from The American Scene. ‘Henry James was among those who resonated – quite literally – to Whitman’s vibrations: reading Leaves [of Grass] aloud, James’s “rich and flexible voice … filled the hushed room like an organ adagio … crooning it in a mood of subdued ecstasy”’ (Edith Wharton’s reminiscence quoted in Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity, p. 39). See also Life, vol. II, p. 570.

Notes to pages 139–44 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

233

McWhirter, ‘“The Whole Chain of Relation and Responsibility’, p. 19. See above, Chapter 6, p. 90. For an interesting consideration of revision both as ‘the hallmark of literary authority’ and ‘as a source of authorial vulnerability’, see Julie Rivkin, ‘Doctoring the Text: Henry James and Revision’, in McWhirter (ed.), Henry James’s New York Edition, pp. 142–63; p. 152. For a stimulating though sometimes far-fetched reading of the tale, its phallic nature, anal eroticism and fascination with waste products in mapping a distant childhood, see Hugh Stevens, ‘Homoeroticism, Identity, and Agency in James’s Late Tales’, in Buelens (ed.), Enacting History in Henry James, pp. 126–47. A more recent reading which adheres to Freud’s ideas on ‘secondary narcissism’, shifts, as it claims, ‘the focus away from the ghost’s identity and the felicity of the tale’s ending and enables a reading of the text as James’s meditation on the psychological conditions of self-knowledge and the conditions of fictionality itself ’ (Shalyn Claggett, ‘Narcissism and the Conditions of Self-Knowledge in James’s “The Jolly Corner”’, Henry James Review, 26 (2005), pp. 189–200; p. 191. John Carlos Rowe offers a simple interpretation of this ghost, though he locates it (in an odd interpretation of the operation of the unconscious) within a history of male James family trauma: ‘the ghost that pursues and is then pursued is youth, the past, history, and the unconscious (especially as it has been shaped by similar moments of ghostly encounter in the lives of Henry James, Sr., and William James)’ (The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 215). The tale was originally published (after several rejections and a change of name from ‘The Second House’ (see Philip Horne, Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 338) in the first number of The English Review, edited by Ford Madox Heuffer, alongside other distinguished contributions, including some of Conrad’s reminiscences. See Aut, p. 278; and above, Chapter 2, p. 14. Letter to Henry James, 24 January 1909, The Correspondence of William James, vol. III, p. 376. Cushing Strout, ‘Henry James’s Dream of the Louvre, “The Jolly Corner”, and Psychological Interpretation’, in Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips (eds), Literature and Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), ppp. 217–31; p. 227. Strout quotes from Adeline Tintner, ‘Landmarks of “The Terrible Town”: The New York Scene in Henry James’s Last Stories’, Prospects, 2 (1976), pp. 406–8. James quoted and discussed in the introduction to HJL, vol. IV, p. xx. CN, pp. 112–13. The editors offer references to other ghostly inspired ‘notes’ of 1879 and 1899 (pp. 10, 183) which involve closed doors and mysterious knocking as anticipating ‘The Jolly Corner’, but the tale is in fact unusually silent and contains no knocking from behind a closed door. In his last years James intended in The Sense of the Past to treat a young man and his ‘alter ego of a past generation of his “race”’ and their coming together, though he confesses too to having been aware when writing the tale of ‘filching in a small way this present put-away one’ (CN, pp. 504–5). Louis Gross, on the other hand, likens Miss Staverton to ‘a subtly terrifying death-in-life of a vampiristic nature’ (Redefining the American Gothic (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989), p. 19). Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. James’s own death-mask forms the ‘title sign’ for Andrew Cutting’s Death in Henry James (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2005), p. 75.

234

Notes to pages 145–53

15. See Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James, p. 237. 16. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–66), vol. XVII: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, p. 226. 17. See Collister, ‘Levels of Disclosure’. 18. ‘The Coxon Fund’, a story about the necessary irregularity of an artist’s life, ends with the burning of an unread letter, a gesture of personal integrity, destroying the vulgar information which might appeal to the curious. In other works such an action can symptomize something more fundamental to the way in which we read James. In a more complex application, writing, according to John Carlos Rowe, may not be trustworthy since it is ‘subject to the vagaries of interpretation that threaten to detour every message from its proper destination’, and can signify ‘the more fundamental mystery and ambiguity that lurk behind every ostensible clue to any possible “solution”’ (The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, p. 7). 19. The suggestive erotic image of the flower is reminiscent of Symbolist painting at the end of the century. Incidentally, James had met Aubrey Beardsley, and he also published a number of his most substantial short stories in the Yellow Book during the 1890s, thus associating himself with ‘the “elite” group of English decadents … the “most dramatic casualties of the crisis in masculinity at the fin de siècle”’ (Bradley, Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence, p. 126 (quotation from Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), p. 170). 20. See above, Chapter 1, pp. 8–9. 21. Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. V: The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part) and On Dreams, p. 371. 22. This superior fearsomeness characterizes James’s celebrated nightmare of pursuing a ‘dimly-descried figure’ in the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon, familiar to him from his youth (Aut, p. 196). Adeline Tintner analyses this dream, in the light of Delacroix’s comments on his Apollo Overcoming the Python which decorates the gallery’s ceiling as the ‘overpowering depiction of the triumph of art and form, poetry and spirit over chaos, deformity, and death’ (The Museum World of Henry James, p. 8). 23. This is what James appreciated in Conrad, ‘the exemplary value of attention, attention given by the author and asked of the reader attested in a case in which it has had almost unspeakable difficulties to struggle with … the claim for method in itself, method in this very sense of attention applied’ (‘The New Novel’ [1914], rpt in LCA, p. 148). 24. Eric Savoy, ‘The Queer Subject of “The Jolly Corner”’, Henry James Review, 20 (1999), pp. 1–21; p. 2. 25. A similar presence takes a predictably more pedestrian and less spectral role of personified, mind-blowingly dull routine and circumstance in Philip Larkin’s ‘Send no Money’: Half life is over now, And I meet full face on dark mornings The bestial visor, bent in By the blows of what happened to happen (The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber, 1964, 1977), p. 43). 26. For the correspondences between the physical damage sustained by the ghostly ‘other’ and John Singer Sargent’s indecisive portrayal of Major Henry Lee Higginson’s left

Notes to pages 153–61

27. 28. 29.

30.

235

hand, see above, Chapter 3, n. 9, p. 217. In an interesting essay, ‘Men from the Boys: Writing on the Male Body’, Ben Knights suggests that ‘the mutilated hand metonymically registers the physical vulnerability of the male being. Confronted by this mutilated figure, Brydon collapses, to be found in a pietà-like pose being tended by his two women … Brydon is thus the very type of the unreconstructed male [i.e., the sort who in Baden-Powell’s language, “run and tell mother”]’ (Literature and History, 13 (2004), pp. 25–42; p. 37). Introduction, AS, p. xxi. In his essay on ‘Homoeroticism, Identity, and Agency in James’s Late Tales’, Hugh Stevens detects here, as he eloquently says, ‘the allure of “rough trade”’ (p. 136). Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, pp. 235–6. The double’s ‘poor ruined sight’ might remind us of the workings of the Sandman who comes to tear out the eyes of children who refuse to sleep, also discussed by Freud, vol. XVII, pp. 227ff. In an analysis of Brydon’s quest for the form of the figure of the imagined past, Deborah Esch offers, in the absence of a psychological term, prosopopoeia, from Greek rhetoric, which signifies the generic process by which the abstract or inanimate are given living characteristics, often within a poetic convention, meaning, literally, face-making (‘A Jamesian About-Face: Notes on “The Jolly Corner”, English Literary History, 50 (1983), pp. 587–605; pp. 594ff.). See also Savoy, ‘The Queer Subject of “The Jolly Corner”’, pp. 10–11.

10 Opening Doors into The Sense of the Past 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

See CN, pp. 504–5, and above, Chapter 9, n. 12, p. 233. The subversive nature of James’s text is entirely eradicated in Berkeley Square, a play in three acts whose plot is ‘suggested by Henry James’s fragment’, written by John Balderston ‘in collaboration with J. C. Squire’ (London: Samuel French, 1928), though early on the American Ambassador does tell the hero, renamed Peter Standish, that he is wearing ‘a very becoming dressing-gown’ (p. 17). Set in London’s Mayfair, the play alternates between the present and 1784, to allow for greater contrast and with walk-on parts for Sir Joshua Reynolds and HRH Duke of Cumberland, ‘elderly, corpulent, aquiline, many-chinned, amiable, and a little drunk’ (p. 53). First performed in October 1926 and intended for West End success, the play tellingly sidelines the intensity of male relationships dramatized in James’s text. See, for instance, Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity, pp. 59–62. ‘First Statement for The Sense of the Past (November 1914)’, rpt in CN, p. 507. T. J. Lustig points out that ‘Brydon initially believes that he has “turned the tables” on his apparitional opponent but the notes for The Sense of the Past forget that the tables are turned once more in the climactic scene of “The Jolly Corner”. Brydon’s renunciation cannot save him from a second ghostly encounter’ (Henry James and the Ghostly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 222). Roderick Hudson, vol. I, p. 50. Compare a contemporary reference to Rowland Mallet in his role of ‘fairy godmother’ (Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 9); also referred to in Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity, p. 32. CT, vol. X, p. 59.

236 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

Notes to pages 164–74 His secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, noted that ‘He had reacted with so much success against both the American accent and the English manner that he seemed only doubtfully Anglo-Saxon … It was only after a visit to America in 1904 that he found, on his return to Rye, that he had a home and a country … But he was never really English or American or even Cosmopolitan’ (Henry James at Work, pp. 4, 31). ‘First Statement’, CN, p. 503. The devastatingly truth-revealing potential of the portrait was dramatized in ‘The Liar’, a short story of 1888. In her essay on the novel, Susan Griffin sees this exchange as exemplifying ‘the dangers and responsibilities of knowledge’ for its hero in an extreme demonstration of ‘the individual’s social and epistemological encounters with the world’ (‘Seeing Doubles: Reflections of the Self in James’s Sense of the Past’, Modern Language Quarterly, 45 (1984), pp. 48–60; p. 48). See ‘First Statement’, pp. 503, 533. See CN, p. 509. Preface to Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America, rpt in LCA, pp. 749, 750, 752–3, 763. For much of the essay the dead poet is affectionately referred to by his first name. LCF, p. 1063. The preface was completed in February 1907 (Horne, Henry James and Revision, p. 340). Michèle Mendelssohn applies Freud’s description of scopophilia to the role of Rowland Mallet in Roderick Hudson: ‘The scopophile, or voyeur, derives pleasure from looking at another person as an erotic object. For Freud the scopophilic drive is a component instinct of sexuality that is not governed by the erogenous zones and is revealed by a tendency to objectify people and subject them to a controlling gaze’ (‘Homosociality and the Aesthetic in Henry James’s Roderick Hudson’, p. 519). Ralph is a knowing participant in this scene, of course. This phrase echoes an idea of 1900 where, pondering the terrible and grotesque possibilities of the novel, he glimpses ‘the tip of a tail to catch, a trail, a scent, a latent light to follow up’ (CN, p. 190). ‘First Statement’, p. 505. Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), p. 134. The ‘watching space’ occupied by the protagonists of The Golden Bowl becomes an arena for the exercise of power and love combined, according to Mark Seltzer: ‘the process of vision everywhere entails a power of supervision’ (Henry James and the Art of Power, p. 63). On James’s ‘avoiding’ and circling tactics in narrative, see also Philip Horne: ‘Readers of James are familiar with the late Jamesian practice of abstaining from specification of significant facts, names and events, creating epistemological abysses round which one warily treads – gaps one may imagine filling in a multiplicity of ways, temptations to the overconfident guesser … Mysteries of reference are James’s stock in trade’ (‘Henry James: The Master and the “Queer Affair” of “The Pupil”’, Critical Quarterly, 37 (1995), pp. 75–92; p. 79). ‘First Statement’, p. 503. See ‘First Statement’, pp. 502, 503; and CN, p. 189.

11 ‘A Round of Visits’ 1.

‘There is something almost impertinent in the way … in which Mr. Stevenson achieves his best effects without the aid of the ladies, and Doctor Jekyll is a capital example of his heartless independence. It is usually supposed that a truly poignant impression cannot be made without them, but in the drama of Mr. Hyde’s fatal ascendancy they remain altogether in the wing’ (Henry James, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, Century Magazine

Notes to pages 174–83

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

237

(April 1888), rpt in LCA, p. 1252. Hugh Stevens discusses James’s indebtedness in ‘The Jolly Corner’ to the Stevenson story (‘Homoeroticism, Identity, and Agency in James’s Late Tales’, p. 131) and also refers to Stephen Heath, ‘Psychopathia Sexualis: Stevenson’s Strange Case’, Critical Quarterly, 28 (1986), p. 95. In The English Review, 5, pp. 46–60, 246–60, reprinted in the collection of short stories, The Finer Grain (New York: Scribner; London: Methuen), in October 1910. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 43. Michel Foucault’s theorizing of changes leading to the construction of homosexuality have been revised over the years. See, for instance, ch. 1: ‘Masculine Desire and the Question of the Subject’ in Dellamora, Masculine Desire; and, for more recent and specific documentation see H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London: Taurus, 2003) and Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Both books are reviewed by Roger Luckhurst in ‘Revising Gay Histories’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 48 (2005), pp. 209–14. See, for instance, Life, vol. II, pp. 187–94, and letters to Edmund Gosse in HJL, vol. IV, pp. 9–10, 12. Hugh Stevens, ‘Queer Henry In the Cage’, in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, pp. 120–38; p. 125. Related emotional conditions have been regarded as endemic in James’s output, causing an impression in reading that ‘the central psychological experience delineated is shame … of sudden exposure, above all of a vulnerable or inferior self to the self; of almost grotesque blights or invalidism or woundedness consequent upon exposure of secrecy, and, on the other hand, of the extraordinary energy released in an effort to conceal and heal these effects of exposure, of secrecy’ (Manfred Mackenzie, ‘Obscure Hurt in Henry James’, Southern Review, 3 (1968), p. 107; quoted in Holly, Intensely Family, pp. 43–4; the reference is to the Australian, not the American, Southern Review. Edward Alsworth Ross in Sin and Society: An Analysis of Latter-Day Iniquity (1907); quoted in Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power, p. 97. See Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 430. See Eric Savoy, ‘“In the Cage”: The Queer Effects of Gay History’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 28 (1995), pp. 284–307; Lynda Zwinger, ‘Bodies That Don’t Matter: The Queering of “Henry James”’, Modern Fiction Studies, 41 (1995), pp. 657–80; and Horne, ‘Henry James: The Master and the “Queer Affair” of “The Pupil”’. Hugh Stevens also finds the names of Mark Monteith and Newton Winch to be amongst those ‘overflowing with innuendo’ (‘Homoeroticism, Identity, and Agency in James’s Late Tales’, p. 127), though I (perhaps innocently) fail to see how. Much has been written on James’s use of ‘queer’ in relation to sexual orientation, to its associative field, and its movement ‘along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all’ (Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 9; see, for instance, Alfred Habegger, ‘What Maisie Knew: Henry James’s Bildungsroman of the Artist as Queer Moralist’, in Buelens (ed.), Enacting History in Hanry James, pp. 93–108; p. 94; Stevens, ‘Homoeroticism, Identity, and Agency in James’s Late Tales’, pp. 145–6; ‘Introduction’ to Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 45. Letters to A. C. Benson and Auguste Monod, ed. E. F. Benson (London: Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 1930), p. 35. For a stimulating reading which interprets ‘this state of desire’ as a form of rebellion against ‘the democratic consistency of the United States’, see Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power, p. 136.

238

Notes to pages 184–90

15. Elaine Showalter, ‘Hysteria, Feminism and Gender’, in Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau and Elaine Showalter, Hysteria beyond Freud (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 286–344; p. 289. She refers to John Russell Reynolds, D. M. Berger, Frans Theodore P. Wolfe, and P. Chodoff and H. Lyons. 16. Feinstein, ‘The Use and Abuse of Illness in the James Family Circle’, p. 236. It is worth recalling that ‘A Round of Visits’ was first published in April 1910, during the period of serious clinical depression and physical decline (‘a strange and most persistent and depressing stomachic crisis’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 439)) which brought James’s nephew Harry and, later, brother William and his wife, Alice, across the Atlantic to care for him. For the historical family antecedents of this nervous collapse see Holly, Intensely Family, p. 43. 17. Comments by a visiting Herbert Spencer in the Boston Evening Transcript, 10 November 1882; quoted in Feinstein, ‘The Use and Abuse of Illness in the James Family Circle’, p. 230. 18. HJL, vol. IV, p. 139. The moustache will be dwelt upon again in The Ivory Tower, see below, Chapter 12, pp. 202–4. 19. ‘Homoerotic writing after 1885 constantly defines itself against the predominant assumption that to be a man-loving man necessarily meant that one was weakened, morally and physically, by the taint of effeminacy’ ( Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), p. 10. 20. See above, Chapter 7, pp. 101–3. 21. See 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 Amato Ragazzo: Lettere a Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Venice: Marsilio, 2000), or its English-language version, Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899–1915: Henry James, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004). See also Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe, ‘Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men’, in Bradley (ed.), Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, pp. 125–35; and Person, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, pp. 12–14. It is interesting that the surviving photographs of James with Hendrik Christian Andersen (those taken, for instance, in his Roman studio) often show them in close physical proximity. 22. Cf. Roderick Hudson to Rowland Mallet: ‘“I’m damnably susceptible, by nature, to the grace and the beauty and the mystery of women, to their power to turn themselves ‘on’ as creatures of subtlety and perversity”’ (Roderick Hudson (London: Macmillan, 1908), New York Edition, vol. I, p. 142). The original, unrevised version of Roderick’s speech reads: ‘“One conviction I have gathered from my summer’s experience”, he went on – “it’s as well to look it frankly in the face – is that I possess an almost unlimited susceptibility to the influence of a beautiful woman”’ (Roderick Hudson (1883), vol. I, p. 106). The change illustrates James’s typically late taste for the colloquial phrase: presumably the term ‘to turn yourself ’, or someone else ‘on’ was current in Edwardian English. Of course anyone who asserts how much he likes women (or ‘the ladies’) must give pause for thought. 23. ‘“Mr Woilde, we ’ave come for tew take yew Where felons and criminals dwell: We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly For this is the Cadogan Hotel” …’ ( John Betjeman, Continual Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse (London: John Murray, 1937), p. 2).

Notes to pages 190–7

239

24. ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, rpt in LCA, p. 1233. See also Graham, Henry James’s Thwarted Love, pp. 32–3. 25. ‘A dream come true as nightmare in which male desire has free rein to play with the abject, dead body of another man’ (Person, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, p. 58).

12 Waking up to ‘some pretty big things’ in The Ivory Tower 1. 2. 3.

‘Description of The Finer Grain (May? 1910)’, CN, p. 577. See above, Chapter 11, p. 182. Life, vol. II, p. 771. Peter Buitenhuis in The Grasping Imagination: The American Writings of Henry James (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1970) has a chapter on The Ivory Tower, and Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (London: Macmillan, 1961; New York: Hafner, 1971), provides a useful description of the composition of the incomplete works, but, more recently, they have claimed limited critical attention. Nicola Bradbury discusses The Ivory Tower at the end of Henry James: The Later Novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) and offers the caveat that ‘nothing found in James’s remarkably full Notes to the last works can have the critical status of the texts themselves … he might well have altered them in revision: he did not publish what we read’ (pp. 200–1). 4. When, in The Golden Bowl, Maggie considers her marriage and finds herself ‘moving for the first time in her life as in the darkening shadow of a false position’, James had introduced the symbol of ‘some strange, tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda’ to suggest ‘the situation’ which had been occupying ‘the very centre of the garden of her life’ (pp. 303, 301). 5. Percy Lubbock, Preface to IT, p. v. 6. See James’s diary entry for Tuesday 31 August 1915: ‘Lunched at 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!’ The editors point out that manchot means having lost an arm, that Sheridan was killed ten days later, and that the novelist also ‘aches at the death, 23 April, of the poet Rupert Brooke – the beautiful youth who took him punting during a Cambridge weekend in 1909’ (CN, pp. 430, 412). It is significant, incidentally, that a trope used for Gray, ‘clinging as yet to his own premises very much even as a stripped swimmer might loiter to enjoy an air-bath before his dive’ (IT, p. 247), should echo the idea of physical perfection attached to Brooke in James’s last essay; see above, Chapter 10, pp. 167–8. 7. Introduction to The Tempest (1907), rpt in LCA, pp. 1207, 1209. 8. See above, Chapter 10, p. 171. 9. For James’s record of the event, see above, Chapter 8, p. 130, and for the critic Richard Brodhead, see above, Chapter 8, n. 41, p. 230. 10. In this modest, boy-like pose, Gray is the antithesis of Hendrick Andersen’s grandiose, inflatedly heroic sculptures about which James could not avoid having misgivings, both aesthetic and commercial: ‘Your production is prodigious and heroic and very beautiful and interesting to me – so much so that, dearest Hendrik, I affectionately and heartily declare, even while seeing less than ever where this colossal multiplication of divinely naked and intimately associated gentlemen and ladies, flaunting their bellies and bottoms and their other private affairs, in the face of day, is going, on any American possibility, to land you’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 405). See Leland S. Person on James’s letters and his use of

240

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

Notes to pages 197–206 ‘sculptural criticism to express his desire for Andersen himself ’ (Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, p. 49). Unlike his own statues, Hendrik Andersen appears to have been a quite slight figure, however; he spent most of his childhood in Newport, incidentally, and James managed to find a few days at the end of his 1904–5 trip to visit with him the place they both knew well, though ‘the stern reality of things’ meant he had to abbreviate his stay with Edith Wharton; he could not do otherwise, he wrote to her – ‘Ich kann nicht anders’ – with perhaps a private pleasure in the German echo of his beloved sculptor’s Norwegian name (HJL, vol. IV, p. 358). John Addington Symonds had privately published A Problem in Greek Ethics in 1883; ‘Symonds was the bridge in Victorian England between the sublimated and coded Hellenistic approach to homosexuality in Whitman and early Pater (and James’s early fiction) and the more open movement promoting homosexual legitimacy associated with the aesthetes that would gather pace after Symonds published his Modern Ethics in 1891 but then meet with a powerful and ultimately successful homophobic counter-reaction which culminated in the Wilde trial of 1895’ (Bradley, Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence, p. 77). The Golden Bowl, p. 105. See, for instance, his letter of 10 August 1904 to Hendrik Christian Andersen: ‘Every word of you is as soothing as a caress of your hand, and the sense of the whole as sweet to me as being able to lay my own upon you’ (HJL, vol. IV, p. 310). The few examples of Andersen’s letters, by contrast, introduce a number of other themes in the relationship as the sculptor represents himself within it. Apologizing for not having written for some time, he confesses, ‘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’. 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’ (Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen 1899–1915, pp. 128, 131). The high value James placed on photography is, of course, attested to in his commissioning of Alvin Langdon Coburn to provide photographs for the volumes of the New York Edition (see Ralph F. Bogardus, Pictures and Texts: Henry James, A. L. Coburn and New Ways of Seeing in Literary Culture (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984). For Beverly Haviland, the uncertainty is ‘indicative of the ambiguity of gender’ in the novel: ‘the “sense of a moustache” being in doubt seems to leave “the sense of difference in things, and of their relations and suitabilities” also very indeterminate’ (Henry James’s Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 170). If this can be regarded as an exemplifying of the sexual, it unites what in late James has been considered to be unnameable (or better not named) in his fiction. In general, the mention of money or the sexual is ‘vulgar’, but avoiding talking about it actually (according to Hugh Stevens) ‘does not end discourse, it creates discourse. Money and sexual desire are the two generative acts of shame in James’s novels’ (Henry James and Sexuality, pp. 18–19). Here the combination, in a homoerotic version, seems to take on a celebratory, if self-indulgent theatricality. CT, vol. IX, pp. 77–8, 83–4. It may be significant that they are smoking cigarettes rather than cigars. Daniel Grylls argues that ‘the cigar, arriving early in the [nineteenth] century, came to be associated with male sexuality and that its significance was subtly altered

Notes to pages 206–7

18.

19.

20.

21.

241

by the growing popularity, later in the century, of the more refined cigarette’. In addition, ‘Cigars – much larger with stronger tobacco – became even clearer signifiers of male carnality. Cigarettes, at first associated with exotic, neurotic or transgressive women, established themselves as indicators of greater sensual refinement’ (‘Smoke Signals: The Sexual Semiotics of Smoking in Victorian Fiction’, English, 55 (2006), pp. 15–35; pp. 15, 30. Rosanna’s father, incidentally, smokes ‘the big portentously “special” cigars that were now the worst thing for him’ (IT, p. 5) as he waits for news of his hated old rival, Mr Betterman. When Davey and Rosanna smoke together (IT, p. 30), the gestures are simple; Rosanna later offers Gray a light for his cigarette ‘passively received by him’. Seeing the curling smoke ‘quickened for him with each puff the marvel of a domestic altar graced at such a moment by the play of that particular flame’ (IT, p. 139). John Carlos Rowe discusses the incident of the unopened letter stored away interestingly as a ‘metadrama concerning writing and its communication of a message or a truth – its procreative function’ in The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, pp. 4–5. Cf. Alfred Habegger: ‘The gender-based ideology that is implicit in the novels of the major phase became queerly explicit after James’s visit to the United States in 1904–5. His essays on the speech and manners of American women that appeared in Harper’s Bazar in 1905 and 1907 brought his lifelong anti-feminism to the surface more clearly than any other public writing of his’ (Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’, p. 235). See Leland S. Person, ‘Henry James, George Sand, and the Suspense of Masculinity’, PMLA, 106 (1991), pp. 515–28; and Peter Collister, ‘“Taking care of yourself ”: Henry James and the Life of George Sand’, Modern Language Review, 83 (1988), pp. 556–70.

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INDEX

Boldface indicates extended discussion. Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 222n.17 Andersen, Hendrik Christian, 10, 140, 166, 167, 212n.22, 239–40n.10, 240n.13, 238n.21 Auden, W. H., 219n.23 Austen, Jane, 56 Balderston, John, Berkeley Square, 235n.2 Balzac, Honoré de, 100, 103 Barker, Gus, 41, 105–7, 109, 226n.11 Baudelaire, Charles, 211–12n.9, 226n.15 Les Fleurs du Mal, 178 Beardsley, Aubrey, 234n.19 Beauvoir, Simone de, 12 Beerbohm, Max, 186 Benjamin, Walter, 211n.9, 226n.15 Benson, A. C., 201 Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo, 201 Bersani, Leo, 170 Betjeman, John, ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’, 190 Blair, Sara, 214n.15, 215n.17 Blake, William, 30, 208 Boelhower, William, 74, 215n.20 Boethius, 47 Bogardus, Ralph R., 240n.14 Boone, Joseph A., 219n.24 Boott, Elizabeth (Lizzie), 135 Bosanquet, Theodora, 11, 109, 236n.8 Boucher, François, 180, 181 Bourget, Paul, 12 Bradbury, Nicola, 239n.3 Bradley, John, R., 10, 13, 219n.26, 234n.19, 240n.11

Bristow, Joseph, 238n.19 Brodhead, Richard, 230n.41 Brooke, Rupert, 167–8, 239n.6 Browning, Robert, 58, 63 Bruner, Jerome, 6–7, 50, 115–16, 156, 214n.13 Bryant, W. C., 59 Buelens, Gert, 221n.6 Buitenhuis, Peter, 239n.3 Butler, Judith, 12, 97 Cadden, Michael, 219n.24 Cargill, Oscar, 239n.3 Carlyle, Thomas, 85 Child, F. J., 100 Claude Lorrain, 51 Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 240n.14 Collister, Peter, 220n.16, 234n.17, 241n.21 Commedia dell’Arte, 2, 150 Cocks, H. G., 237n.4 Conrad, Joseph, 143, 150, 233n.7, 234n.23 Cook, Matt, 237n.4 Cooper, Fenimore, 59, 224n.27 Cornhill Magazine, 42, 122–3 Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille, 35, 51 Crowe, Eyre, 121, 124 Cruikshank, George, 120, 122 Dante Alighieri, 46–7, 128 Paradiso, 46 Daumier, Honoré, 124 Degas, Edgar, 220n.12 Dellamora, Richard, 8, 221n.14, 237n.4

– 255 –

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Dickens, Charles, 7, 17, 62, 83, 119–20, 123, 125, 129, 198, 228n.25 David Copperfield, 120 Dickinson, Emily, 127, 229n.35 Doré, Gustave, 84–5, 223n.8 Du Bois, W. E. B., 216n.2 du Maurier, George, 45 Dupee, F. W., 9–10, 226–7n.1 Dürer, Albrecht, 39 Eakin, Paul John, 116 Edel, Leon, 4, 10, 44, 78, 87, 91, 140, 153, 166, 186, 219n.24, 223n.17, 224n.21 Eliot, George, 85, 123, 219n.4 Ellmann, Richard, 229n.35, 237n.8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 39, 85, 218n.17, 223n.9 Ender, Evelyne, 222n.2 Esch, Deborah, 235n.30 Esteve, Mary, 213n.3 Feinstein, Howard M., 19, 97, 185 Fielding, Henry, 56 Fields, Annie Adams, 37, 42–3, 44 Fields, James T., 37, 42–3, 44, 104 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, 6, 63 Follini, Tamara, 227n.18, 229n.30 Fortnightly Review, 226n.14 Foucault, Michel, 8, 176, 178, 237n.4 Freedman, Jonathan, 83 Freud, Sigmund, 13, 144, 149, 151, 154, 184, 236n.15, 235n.29 An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 144 The Interpretation of Dreams, 149 ‘The Uncanny’, 144, 154 Fromentin, Eugène, 132, 230–1n.47 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 17 Gergen, Kenneth, 50 Gilder, Richard, 220n.11 Goldsmith, Oliver, 54, 161, 219n.4 Gordon, Lyndall, 9, 222n.19, 226n.1 Gosse, Edmund, 8 Graham, Wendy, 223n.14 Gray, John Chipman, 38, 43, 134 Greely, Horace, 55 Griffin, Susan M., 236n.10

Gross, John, 226n.14 Gross, Louis, 233n.13 Grylls, Daniel, 240n.17 Gunter, Susan E., 238n.21 Habegger, Alfred, 96–7, 222n.7, 224n.22, 227n.8, 232nn.58, 60, 241n.20 Halberstam, Judith, 12 Halperin, David, 12 Hammond, Mason, 216n.5 Haralson, Eric, 74, 80, 212n.16, 228n.20, 235n.3, 237n.11 Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native, 144, 211n.6 Haviland, Beverly, 240n.15 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 130, 132, 172, 195, 228n.25, 230n.41 The Marble Faun, 172 Hayes, Kevin J., 235n.6 Higginson, Henry Lee, 40–1, 216–17n.8, 218n.17, 229n.35, 230n.40, 234n.26 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 223n.17, 229n.35 Hodgson, Ralph, 186 Hoffa, William, 229n.30 Hoffmann, Charles and Tess, 222n.3, 226n.9 Hogarth, William, 7 Holly, Carol, 19, 219n.24, 227n.16, 237n.6, 238n.16 Holmes, Oliver Wendell ( Jr), 43, 81, 87, 100, 217nn.14, 15, 220n.2, 223n.17 Horne, Philip, 233n.7, 236n.18, 237n.9 Howe, Julia Ward, 43 Howells, W. D., 45 Hunt, William Morris, 61, 106, 131 Irving, Washington, 52–3, 56 ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, 53 ‘Rip Van Winkle’, 53 James, Alice (sister), 9, 46, 47, 117, 121, 127, 184, 218n.22, 223n.16, 226n.13, 227n.18, 228n.26, 229n.35 James, Alice Howe Gibbens (William’s wife), 117, 134, 232nn.55, 60, 238n.16 James, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky, brother), 41, 75, 81, 98–9, 102, 127, 128,

Index 217n.8, 218n.17, 223n.18, 224n.23, 225n.3, 227n.8, 231n.49 James, Henry, and Mary Walsh (parents), 46 James, Henry novels The Ambassadors, 4, 8, 39, 145, 171, 211n.8 The Bostonians, 41 60, 98, 133, 216n.5, 220n.11, 222n.2 The Golden Bowl, 197, 221n.10, 228n.23, 230n.46, 236n.18, 239n.4 The Ivory Tower, 4, 6, 49, 62, 82, 110, 127, 138, 156, 159, 160, 171, 192–209, 226n.12, 239n.3 Roderick Hudson, 13, 77, 87, 159, 164, 191, 219n.7, 223n.12, 236n.15, 238n.22 The Sacred Fount, 1–3, 6, 11 The Sense of the Past, 4, 12, 138, 156–73, 175, 186, 194, 206, 233n.12, 235n.5 The Turn of the Screw, 151, 154, 157, 161, 172 Washington Square, 18 The Wings of the Dove, 123 other writings The American Scene, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 14–80, 102, 115, 119, 129, 130, 134, 138, 139, 146, 148, 151, 155, 164, 174, 175, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 192, 193, 201, 211n.9, 213n.3, 215n.18, 216n.12, 231n.54, 234n.26 Autobiography (A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, The Middle Years), 4, 7, 10, 12, 14, 55, 62, 64, 90, 98, 99, 103, 107, 111–37, 138, 172, 225n.8, 226n.1, 227n.9, 232n.60 Italian Hours, 66, 76, 145 The Life of William Wetmore Story and his Friends, 63, 127, 218n.16 short stories ‘The Coxon Fund’, 234n.18 ‘Crapy Cornelia’, 24, 214n.15 ‘The Death of the Lion’, 205–6 ‘De Grey: A Romance’, 127 ‘The Jolly Corner’, 4, 11, 12, 58, 65, 118, 129, 138–55, 156, 157, 158,

257 159, 166, 174, 175, 217n.9, 233n.12, 235n.5, 236n.1 ‘The Middle Years’, 90, 139, 149 ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’, 4, 52, 81–2, 93–6, 98, 172 ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’, 157 ‘Poor Richard’, 4, 81–2, 90–3, 98 ‘A Round of Visits’, 4, 12, 94, 169, 171, 174–91, 192, 193, 195, 196, 200, 202, 205, 209, 214n.11, 226n.12, 238n.16 ‘The Story of a Year’, 4, 81–2, 83–90, 93, 96, 98, 99, 104, 223n.10 and business, 5, 14, 15, 16, 30, 36, 64, 139, 155, 192, 193, 208 young men of business, 28–30 and Civil War, 41, 34, 41, 42, 69–70, 71, 74, 81, 98–110, 128–9, 153, 186 and the Civil War soldier, 8, 65, 70, 71, 76, 78–9, 86, 87, 96, 97, 98–110, 114, 202 and ethnicity, 23–6, 32, 74, 129, 215n.18 and feminization, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81, 85, 87, 88, 91, 97, 100, 128–9, 150, 184, 185, 190 as flâneur, 6, 11, 12, 113, 166, 211–12n.9 and gender, 2, 11, 12, 13, 29, 58, 75, 78, 82, 87, 88, 91, 93, 94, 97, 114, 128, 159–60, 168, 176, 182, 184, 207–8 and the homoerotic, 8, 13, 15–16, 82, 85–6, 87, 97, 99, 103, 156, 162, 167–8, 178, 186, 189, 191, 204 and homosocial relations, 11, 12, 87, 90, 94, 156, 177, 187, 192, 205, 208 and identity, 5, 6–7, 11, 13, 14, 18, 19, 26, 32, 35, 36, 53, 69, 127, 139, 140, 149, 176 and invalidism, 77–8, 93–4, 112–13, 177, 183–5 and language and discourse, 14, 15, 25, 26, 32–3, 71–2, 139–40, 141, 145, 154, 155 as man of letters, 25, 26–7, 33, 39, 41, 50, 51, 52, 59, 111, 119, 127, 134, 140, 155 and mutilation, 5, 18, 65, 139, 153, 217n.9, 234–5n.26 and New York Edition, 3, 9, 13, 25, 64, 98, 115, 128, 138, 168

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and revision, 5, 6, 7, 9, 44, 64, 83, 97, 114–15, 116, 128, 130, 138, 139, 141, 164, 184, 206, 227n.8, 229n.30, 233n.4 and sexual anxiety, 20, 83, 155, 186, 202, 207 and submissiveness, 5, 11, 14, 16, 27, 46 and transgressive male relations, 87, 92, 97, 161, 163–4, 165, 167, 176, 178, 184, 189, 192 and women: dismissive of, 29, 66, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 94, 96, 117, 142, 160, 176, 180, 184, 190, 206, 207 James, Henry (Harry, nephew), 28, 116, 137, 229n.30, 238n.16 James, Robertson (brother), 81 James, William (brother), 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 25, 33, 39, 40, 46–7, 54, 60, 61, 70, 78, 81, 85, 99, 106, 107, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 134, 135, 138, 140, 149, 185, 193, 216n.2, 217–18n.10, 220n.2, 223n.18, 224n.23, 224n.3, 226n.13, 229n.30, 238n.16 Jobe, Steven H., 238n.21 Johnson, Kendall, 220–1n.2 Kaplan, Fred, 213n.26 Keats, John, 53, 201 The Eve of St Agnes, 49 Kemble, Fanny, 5, 17, 75 Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, 73 King, Anne, 110 King, Charlotte, 108, 110, 226n.13 King, Vernon, 107–10 Knights, Ben, 235n.26 Kristeva, Julia, 143 La Farge, John, 10, 20, 61, 106, 126, 131–4, 230nn.44, 45, 47, 231nn.48, 50, 54 La Farge, Margaret, 10 Larkin, Philip, Whitsun Weddings, 234n.25 Lazarus, Emma, 37 Lazise, Alberto Bevilacqua, 10, 212–13n.22 LeClair, Robert C., 230n.44 Lejeune, Philippe, 116 Lewis, R. W. B., 217n.11, 220n.2, 224n.2, 225n.6, 229n.35

Lincoln, Abraham, 103, 130, 219n.5 Litvak, Joseph, 229n.32 Longfellow, Henry W., 39 Lorrain, Claude see Claude Lorrain Lowell, James Russell, 39, 45, 167, 218n.18 ‘Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, 1865’, 96 Lubbock, Percy, 4, 138, 156, 197, 206 Luckhurst, Roger, 237n.4 Lustig, T. J., 235n.5 McWhirter, David, 139, 211n.3, 227n.9, 229n.30 Man, Paul de, 227n.11 Matthiessen, F. O., 117, 211n.5 Melville, Herman, Moby Dick, 219n.6 Mendelssohn, Michèle, 223n.12, 236n.15 Mérimée, Prosper, 133 Millgate, Michael, 227n.10 Milton, John, 35, 54 Monet, Claude, 220n.20 Monnier, Henri, 124 Moon, Michael, 226n.15 Motley, J. L., 39 Nadali, Jean, 119 Nelson, Robert K., 215n.17 Norcom, Eugene, 107 Norton, Charles Eliot, 47 Norton, Grace, 5 Novick, Sheldon M., 217n.14, 219n.26 Parkman, Francis, 39 Payne, Darwin, 221n.7 Perrault, Charles, 48, 84, 223n.8 ‘Les Fées’, 48, 82, 83 Perry, Lilla Cabot, 220n.20 Perry, Thomas Sergeant, 10, 65, 137, 223n.10, 226n.11, 230n.46, 231n.49 Person, Leland S., 223n.12, 225n.8, 238n.21, 239nn.25, 10, 241n.21 Pilling, John, 229n.36 Polkinghorne, Donald, 7 Pope, Alfred H., 57 Posnock, Ross, 22, 24, 139, 211n.9 Powers, Lyall H., 219n.24 Prescott, W. H., 39 Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 216n.7

Index Rawlings, Peter, 223n.10 Revue des Deux Mondes, 64, 131–2, 230n.66 Rivkin, Julie, 233n.4 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 153 Rotundo, E. Anthony, 223n.17, 224n.27 Rowe, John Carlos, 212n.19, 227n.2, 233n.6, 234n.18, 241n.19 Russell, Cabot James, 41, 99–100, 103, 225n.7 Russell, W. C., 99 Ryan, Susan M., 217n.11 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 98, 99, 224n.3, 225nn.3, 5 Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 13 Sargent, John Singer, 40, 55, 63, 153, 212n.19, 216nn.7, 8, 217nn.8, 9, 10, 218n.17, 229n.35, 234n.26 Savoy, Eric, 152, 235n.30, 237n.9 Scott, Walter, 220n.11 Scudéri, Madeleine de, 53 Sears, John F., 60, 219n.2 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 8, 13, 212n.9, 219n.24, 221n.7, 237n.11 Seltzer, Mark, 214n.11, 236n.18, 237n.14 Shaw, Robert Gould, 41, 98, 218n.17, 225nn.3, 5, 7 Showalter, Elaine, 184 Spaulding, John Taylor, 220n.12 Spenser, Edmund, 26, 35, 54 Starobinski, Jean, 117 Stern, Robert A. M., 213n.1 Stevens, Hugh, 176, 177, 212n.16, 233n.5, 235n.28, 236n.1, 237n.10, 240n.16 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 190, 236–7n.1 Story, William Wetmore, 34, 63, 127, 218n.16 Stowe, William W., 219n.3 Strout, Cushing, 140 Sturgis, Alexander, 212n.9 Sturgis, Howard, 8, 220n.13 Symonds, John Addington, 8, 212n.16, 240n.11 Temple, Mary (Minny), 38, 61, 87, 91, 114, 115, 116, 126, 127, 134–7, 142, 161, 227n.18, 232n.60 Temple, William James, 41

259

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 7, 21, 42, 121–2, 123, 212n.9, 228nn.26, 27 The Newcomes, 121–2 Vanity Fair, 121 Theocritus, 54 Thoreau, Henry David, 39, 59 Ticknor, George, 39 Tintner, Adeline, 140, 217n.9, 223n.8, 233n.10, 234n.22 Toibin, Colm, 222n.2 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 186 Trachtenberg, Alan, 18, 214n.7 Trollope, Anthony, 123 Turgenev, Ivan, 112, 231n.53 Turner, J. M. W., 51 Warren, Kenneth W., 74, 215n.18, 221n.6 Watteau, Antoine, 2 Wharton, Edith, 62, 77, 233n.2 Whitman, Walt, 16, 59, 61, 87, 100, 102, 103, 130, 138, 186, 214n.4, 215n.17, 219n.5, 232n.2, 240n.11 ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, 29 ‘To a Stranger’, 16 ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, 219n.5 Whittier, John Greenleaf, ‘Maud Müller’, 90 Wilde, Oscar, 8, 157, 176, 186, 190, 207, 212n.16, 240n.11 Wister, Owen, 68, 73, 74–8, 79, 159 Lady Baltimore, 73–4, 221n.7 The Virginian, 68, 77 Wister, Sara, 5, 73, 77 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 9, 78–9, 80, 221n.14 ‘A Florentine Experiment’, 211n.2 Rodman the Keeper, 78–9, 222n.17 Wordsworth, William, 59 Zola, Émile, 16 Zorzi, Rosella Marioli, 238n.21 Zwinger, Linda, 237n.9