Ten

“MISS GRIEF”

1886–1891

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One evening in May 1887, he dressed in a brilliant crimson cape and a splendid black velvet hat and descended from his villa on Bellosguardo into the crowded streets of Florence. The ancient city was celebrating the completion of the ornamental facade of the Duomo, which had taken almost six hundred years to achieve. Resplendent in his Renaissance costume, he danced in a “wonderful tapestried hall” in the Palazzo Vecchio at a grand ball in honor of the king and queen. “I wish you could have seen me,” he wrote to Fanny Kemble—“I was lovely!”1

No sooner had he moved into 34 De Vere Gardens in early 1886 than he had felt a restless longing for Italy. From across the Alps, invitations came from the Bootts and Constance Fenimore Woolson in Florence, from the Curtises at Palazzo Barbaro and Katherine Bronson at Ca’Alvisi in Venice. His restlessness did not reflect dissatisfaction with De Vere Gardens. “My flat is perfection,” he told William, “& ministers, more than I can say, to my health, my spirits & my work.” But he had not “crossed the Alps for nearly six years,” which seemed to him ages. His fantasy of spending a good part of each year in Italy still flickered. Irked by the constraints that London attractions and routines placed on his reading time, he had reason to exaggerate the amount of work he felt he accomplished away from London. Italian memories and voices called. In February 1886, he was startled with the news from Florence that Lizzie had married Frank Duveneck, an event so long in the making that he had thought it might not happen. Although he was pleased that for Lizzie the marriage was an affirmation of life, he was sad at what he felt the discordances of the match, Lizzie’s loss of “independence and freedom,” and the difficulties the new situation might create for the elderly Francis Boott. Together, he and Alice sent “a very modest nuptial offering … of 2 small pieces of silver” that “would have been more splendid” had he not found himself “terribly pauperized” by furnishing De Vere Gardens. “There may be no Italy for me this spring.”2

The pauperization was an exaggeration to which he had become increasingly prone as he worried about the unpredictable fluctuations in his income. There were other reasons, though, for postponing a long visit to Italy. He wanted first to finish The Princess Casamassima, whose last installment was to appear in the Atlantic in October 1886. Some of the income from this he saved for his visit to Italy, and some he set aside to cover what he anticipated would be a lean period of diminished earnings. He had no serial novel in prospect for the next year. Alice’s medical prognosis seemed as confused, as bleak, as unsatisfactory as ever. When one doctor diagnosed “gouty diathesis complicated by an abnormally sensitive nervous organization” with “neurosis in her legs … brought about by anxiety and strain,” and predicted that “her health would improve when she reached menopause,” Alice remarked, sardonically, that the latter “seems highly probable as I have had sixteen periods the last year.” She had little desire to live that long. It seemed inconceivable to her that she would. For her brother, she was a responsibility that he took on unquestioningly. Without Katherine’s presence, his loyalty helped keep him in England. When Katherine, to his delight, returned from the Continent in June 1886 to remain until early July, he helped Alice move to summer quarters in Leamington, the hundred miles’ distance from London an expression of Alice’s desire not to be a burden to her brother. She soon decided, after Katherine’s departure for the Riviera in September, to stay on in Leamington, which appeared to Henry a “depressing solitary little place” but, to Alice, pleasantly quiet and conveniently economical.³

Her attempt to assert independence made Italy seem a little closer. So too did the completion, in late September 1886, of the Princess. The novel disappointed many of its readers, including William, who continued to be outspoken about his brother’s fiction. In the three years since they had last seen one another, William and his wife had become parents twice more, though sorely tested by the death of an infant son. “Poor little mortal,” Henry tried to console him, “with his small toddling promenade here below, one wonders whence he came and whither he is gone.” He felt most for his sister-in-law. She gave birth the next year to a daughter, Mary Margaret. “These occasions make me indeed feel that I have simplified, though doubtless also (in a sense,) impoverished my life in remaining unmarried.” Still living in a rented Cambridge house, William bought, for twenty-five hundred dollars, in the same month that Henry finished the Princess, a tract of seventy-five acres with “fine oak and pine woods, a valuable mineral spring, two houses and a barn” on Chocorua Lake near Conway, New Hampshire, five hours by train and carriage from Boston. His career at Harvard had been prospering, his teaching, which he disliked, widely praised. He published widely read papers and gave lectures advocating a psychology within which there were strong elements of realistic pragmatism, physiological materialism, and psychological speculation. “These inhibitions,” he wrote Alice, “these split-up selves, all these new facts that are gradually coming to light about our organization, these enlargements of the self in trance, etc., are bringing me to turn for light in the direction of all sorts of despised spiritualistic and unscientific ideas. Father would find in me today a much more receptive listener.”4 Having signed, in 1880, a contract to write a psychology textbook, he felt frustrated at his slow progress on a book that was to take him ten years to complete. Its success was to elevate him from Cambridge to world fame.

William frankly told his brother—who felt exhausted after completing the Princess, having written two full-length novels in less than three years and who vowed never again to write a novel “nearly so long”—that he thought his brother’s book a failure. Alice, who thought it magnificent, told William off. “I was vehemently indignant for 24 hrs. but now I shrug my shoulders, the Princess being one of those things apart that one rejoices in keeping & having to one’s self. It is sad however to have to class one’s eldest brother … among those whom Flaubert calls the bourgeois, but I have been there before!” Though reviewers, whom Henry did his best to ignore or devalue, were mostly either harsh or indifferent, loyal friends provided praise and support. Edmund Gosse had a genius for slightly unctuous compliments and exercised it regularly, and George du Maurier did not hesitate to tell James how brilliant he thought the Princess, how happily surprised he was at his friend’s unexpected success in depicting “cockney vulgarity” and “the lower walks of London.… No English book that I have read for years either by yourself or any one else has wrapped me up so completely, or held me so intent.… Delightful refined & finished as your work has always been, this seems different in mind—much deeper chords are struck & sympathies appealed to.”⁵ The praise echoed James’s own hopes for the book. Its poor sales and reviews disappointed them.

When Lizzie sent him wedding pictures, he responded to her query about why he did not come to join her at Bellosguardo that he was “unprepared with any excuse but the simple allegation that I am an idiot.” How lovely it would be to smoke a cigarette with her in the beautiful garden with the best view in the world! He did have other excuses, including a fatigue that he hoped might respond to his spending the summer in his “new-& very conducive-to-quiet-&-work apartment.” Finally, the town was quiet after the hectic social season—a springtime of dining out at what seemed mostly dull evening occasions, with only occasional flashes of conversational interest. There had been an inundation of American visitors, which made London seem more and more an American town during the social season and into the summer. He joked that he did not need to return to America to replenish his American experiences. What he called his “widows,” whether their husbands were alive or not, came in their usual numbers, including Katherine Bronson, in England for the summer; Isabella Gardner, on her way to Bayreuth; and one of his Washington friends from the Adams circle, Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge. Mrs. Gardner particularly clung to him. Her eccentric arrogance and deep sadness he found attractive, though she seemed more buoyant than when he had spent time with her in London two years before. Then she had seemed “worn & tired by her travels, but full of strange reminiscences, & in despair at going back to Boston, where she has neither friends, nor lovers, nor entertainment nor resources of any kind left. She was exceedingly nice, while here, & I pity her.”6

Henry Adams was not one of the visitors, having taken his weary spirit off to Japan, his traveling companion, John La Farge. In January 1886, in Washington, Clover Adams, the most exclusive society hostess in the capital, without any visible anticipation or explanation except the recent death of her much-loved father, had killed herself in her photography studio by drinking potassium cyanide—the same Clover Hooper whom James had known since his Cambridge youth and with whom he had sat happily on the porch in the summer at Shady Hill all those years ago. “Hereditary melancholy” was the convenient, conventional diagnosis. Her Bostonian father had committed suicide, and her sister, Ellen Gurney, whom James admired, was soon to end her life by throwing herself in front of a train. Clover Adams, he wrote to Godkin, has found “the solution of the knottiness of existence. I am more sorry for poor Henry than I can say—too sorry, almost, to think of him.”⁷

Two former Parisians had become London friends, one rather elusive, the other clinging. The latter, the novelist Paul Bourget, “an amiable Frenchman,” James had met through Sargent in 1884. Bourget was “literary, clever, a gentleman, & an Anglomaniac, but rather affected. I take him next week to spend a day or two at Ferdinand Rothschild’s.” Eleven years younger than James, the handsome, energetic Bourget had traveled widely. He loved England almost as much as he loved himself. He had the hard-driving ambition of a French man of letters to whom no genre was foreign, and was determined to earn fame and fortune as quickly as possible. In 1885, his novel, Cruel Enigma, a seminaturalistic, psychologically steamy depiction of passion and corruption in the French upper classes, became a great popular success. It was the first in a series of successes, which, with his Catholic conservatism, led to his elevation to the Académie françhise ten years later. Worshipfully admiring James, Bourget spent the summer of 1884 in England. “He is too much of a dilettante,” James told Perry, “but he is a very sympathetic & attractive being (aet. about 33) has a most subtle & brilliant little intelligence & is one of the most charming & ingenious talkers I ever met.” James liked Bourget, without admiring his work. Their friendship was to be a long one—and James was to excuse what he felt to be Bourget’s failings of character and flaws as an artist by blaming French culture rather than Bourget himself. “I have got out of him,” he explained to William, “that I know him as if I had made him—his nature, his culture, his race, his type.… Your remarks about the putrefaction of the French character are admirable—and oh, how Bourget lights them up!”8 James provided Bourget with letters of introduction to friends in Italy and in America. He spent time with him in Paris, in the south of France, where Bourget, soon after his marriage in 1890, bought a handsome villa, and in Italy, where in 1893 they spent several enjoyable weeks together. When Bourget dedicated Cruel Enigma to him, he was more embarrassed than flattered, the story “so malpropre” that he felt compromised in the straitlaced London world.

Sargent, who had left Bourget in James’s hands, now spent more time in England than in France. James found Sargent’s friendship attractive but his presence “incorrigibly vague & elusive.… I have lavished much friendship upon him, & he ought to do the few things I ask him,” James complained to Lizzie Boott, “but he is very slippery.” He granted, as many people had remarked, that Sargent was spoiled. Still, he got on with Sargent well and liked him immensely. To Sargent he owed the bemusing experience of entertaining at the beginning of July 1885 three French visitors to London, the most noteworthy of them Count Robert de Montesquiou, for whom Sargent had written a letter of introduction. An effeminate, affected, elegantly picturesque homosexual, Montesquiou, who was later to be a source for Proust’s Baron de Charlus and whose portrait Sargent painted, was more interested in being introduced to the notorious Whistler than to James. The three Frenchmen yearned “to see London aestheticism.” James found Montesquiou “curious, but slight.” At a dinner that he hosted at the Reform Club, James did “proper honour” to Sargent’s introduction, entertaining Whistler and the Frenchmen to whom Whistler “desires greatly to show … the ‘peacock room.’ … On the whole nothing that relates to Whistler is queerer than anything else.”9 James was scrupulously polite to Montesquiou.

He and Gosse accepted Sargent’s invitation to visit Broadway, a pastoral Worcestershire village where Sargent summered with other American expatriate artists, particularly Edwin Abbey and Frank Millet, the latter “a prodigy of Yankee energy and practicality.” James found the mildly bohemian atmosphere of the Broadway colony pleasantly attractive. Probably he enjoyed the American voices, the American flavor. He went for brief visits for four consecutive summers. It “does something to keep me ‘in touch’ … with the land of my birth,” he told Henrietta Reubell. He found “Sargent … quite domesticated there, portraits of ladies, painters’ wives … & looking very big & brawny & happy. He ‘fits in,’ beautifully; he would fit in to everything, & isn’t critical & fastidious, like you … & me!” In the autumn, in Bournemouth, visiting “poor sick Stevenson,” he admired “Sargent’s little picture of him, shuffling about in his room & pulling his moustache. It is very queer & charming.” So too was its painter, so much so that he regretted Sargent’s plan to spend the entire summer of 1886 “buried” in Broadway. When James visited, Sargent did “a very pretty small pencil drawing” of him, a profile emphasizing his high forehead, sharp nose and intense eyes. His hairline had receded so far back that, joined with the beard in profile, his face seemed divided into half darkness, half light. In late 1887, to James’s disappointment, Sargent went to America, “where he set up a studio in New York” and had wealthy “sitters & triumphs & glory,” including a portrait of “Mrs. Jack.”¹⁰ He seemed always on the move.

James decided that he also needed to move, to leave England for a while. After a difficult few years, he wanted to make an exclamatory break between his years at Bolton Street and the new comfort and creativity that he hoped would be his for the rest of his life at De Vere Gardens. He felt that he had earned a substantial holiday. London had become familiar and convenient, less challenging, more routinized. “I dislike more & more the everlasting social mill of this populous town. It is too dull for a lively place, & too lively for a dull one. Just so, I am too old (in spirit) to go out & yet too young to stay in—& so I get on not without friction.” His intention was to spend a few weeks in Florence, where he had friends and happy memories, then a week each in Rome, Naples, and Venice. His spirits rose in anticipation. “The thought of going to Italy, again, after a long & loathesome divorce, is absolutely rapturous to me.” Early in December 1886, he crossed the Alps, traveling first to Milan, where he walked all morning, “drinking in the delicious Italian sun,” and then to Pisa, where he had a moment of heartrending nostalgia thinking about the first time he had ever been there. “Do you remember,” he asked Grace Norton, “one day when you were all here, your brother, & Jane, & Susan, in 1869—somewhat earlier in the autumn than this. We were all at this hotel & nothing seems to me changed—except everything!”11 A few days later, in the garden of a Florentine villa, he smoked a cigarette and looked down, with relaxed satisfaction, at what he still thought the most beautiful view in the world. At least that had not changed.

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Immediately in view at a neighboring villa was Constance Fenimore Woolson. Their friendship had become a warm one, a relationship built on her adoration of him, their shared profession, and his fondness for a companionable woman he thought both talented and good. Her residence in Chelsea in late 1883 and for much of the next two years had made them frequent companions, though at “discreet intervals.”¹² They went to the theatre together. They visited Stonehenge. There was a need for discretion and some distancing, probably because he saw the danger of matrimonial rumors and his position being misunderstood. He valued her intelligence, her dedication to her work, and, most of all, her skills as a listener. Her health, particularly her tendency to find dark days and cold weather depressing, made England difficult for her. She fantasied about warmer climates, particularly Florida and Italy. Leaving London in early 1886, she returned to Florence, the city in which she had first met James.

With Woolson in Italy there was an additional incentive for crossing the Alps again. In May 1886, he asked Francis Boott to look her up at her pensione to introduce her to people and liven up her social life. “If Lizzie could take a look at her and attract her to the villa I should be so glad.” Reclusive, shy, her isolation and self-reliance probably heightened by her semideafness, Woolson needed to have a hand extended to her. “She is a deaf and méticuleuse old maid—but she is also an excellent and sympathetic being.” He hoped to join her in Florence in the fall, to visit her after she had settled on Bellosguardo, near the Bootts, in the Villa Brichieri, a fourteen-room house that she had rented cheaply for the next year. As he delayed his departure from London, his impatience grew. He thanked Boott for being attentive to Woolson. “Tell your father I thank him for the kindness which she tells me he has shown her in profusion.” With a touch of condescension, he told Lizzie that though he would also be going to Venice and Rome, he would spend enough time in Florence to satisfy both his lady friends. “Our good Fenimore must also be worked in—but I shall be equal even to that. I am only glad you are nice to her—she is a very good woman, with an immense power of devotion (to HJ.!).… I don’t intend to see any one but you & Fenimore.”13

Woolson’s own expectations may have been for greater intimacy between them. At one time, she may have fantasied that marriage was a possibility. If so, her pragmatism and pessimism told her that now, in her early forties, spinsterhood was almost a certainty. Having, like him, to earn her own living, she could bring neither money nor social standing to a marriage. She also had a perceptive awareness of his limitations. His self-absorption and emotional efficiency were unmistakable. Like him, she was compulsively dedicated to her work, one of whose central themes was the tense interplay between the female artist and social conventions. “A man’s true earnest love is a great gift,” she had written to a friend years before. “The glory of your life has come to you. Everything else is trivial compared to it.”¹⁴ She had had to settle for lesser things. Part of her power as an artist lay in the effective projection of the conflict between her needs as a woman and her situation as a writer. Two brilliant stories, “Miss Grief’ and “The Street of the Hyacinth”—the first written soon after she had met James in Florence in 1880, the second, two years later—and a third story, “At the Château of Corinne,” written in 1887, indirectly track her relationship with him. They express her anger, her disappointment, even her resignation, in a friendship that meant so much to her both in pleasure and pain.

Whether he guessed at his appearances in her stories is unclear. “Miss Grief” presents a fantasy about the ultimate triumph over obscurity of an unrecognized, aging woman writer through the limited, only partly prescient assistance of a minor male writer. In the first-person narration, Woolson presents a narrator who combines elements of James’s limited male narrators and elements of James himself. Undoubtedly he read “Miss Grief” and “The Street of the Hyacinth.” Perhaps the two writers talked about the stories. But his public criticism of her work, a generous tribute to her talents that he probably wrote in the fall of 1886 while they were together in Florence, focused on an appraisal of her most recent novel, East Angels, which he admired. She was an example, he told Harper’s readers, of the equality, if not the primacy, of women writers in contemporary literature. Her work “breathes a spirit singularly and essentially conservative—the sort of spirit which, but for a special indication pointing the other way, would in advance seem most to oppose itself to the introduction into the feminine lot of new and complicating elements. Miss Woolson evidently thinks that lot sufficiently complicated.… It would never occur to her to lend her voice to the plea for further exposure—for a revolution which should place her sex in the thick of the struggle for power.” Her strengths are her ability to evoke daily life with evocative details, her compassion for her characters, her sympathetic imaginative powers, “her general attitude of watching life, waiting upon it and trying to catch it in the fact.” She had a gift for realism. She had a sometimes too exclusive fascination with the “tender passion,” with the female situation and marriage. But insofar as it expressed “the stamp of the author’s conservative feeling, the implication that for her the life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations,” he had no objection to make. Between the lines of his public expression of his admiration for her, he implied that here was a woman who suited his values. Henry senior would have approved. She was a writer he could admire without feeling threatened, a woman he could love without loving her as a woman.

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Rather than squeeze into “some small tourist-hole in an insanitary Florentine hotel,” he accepted Woolson’s invitation to sublease, for the last three weeks of December 1886, the “roomy and rambling” apartment she had rented in the Villa Brichieri on Bellosguardo. It was not convenient for her to leave the nearby villa she was in until the first of the New Year. With a two-year lease on Brichieri, she would have plenty of time to enjoy it. James assured the nervous Bootts that there was no reason to be concerned: The villa would be neither too isolated nor too cold. Probably they were more worried about his relationship with Fenimore, who would be just a five-minute walk away. Happy at the prospect of being neighbors again, he told Francis Boott that he would decline his offer to stack wood in preparation for his arrival. He imagined that Fenimore, “whose devotion—like my appreciation of it is sans borne, has stacked me up a pile with her own hands. She is a gallant friend, but I am afraid she has bored you with me. Never mind, you will have your revenge; she will bore me with you.” She had plenty of opportunity to do so. “I see her every day,” he told their mutual friend John Hay, “indeed often dine with her.”15

Although happy to be back in Florence, he disliked the constant rain and the sharp reminders of general poverty and decay. With fires blazing against the December cold, he had in mind work to do. “I am soon to write a short novel called ‘The Tragic Muse.’ I think,” he told Grace Norton, “of studying the heroine from you.” He began writing an essay on Stevenson for The Century Magazine and planned a number of short stories. But the adjustment to Italy took time. His spirits were at first low, his hopes for renewal and energy disappointed. He still imagined that he would remain for six to eight weeks, though he began to entertain the thought of staying longer. When he discovered that Alice, who had moved from Leamington to an apartment near his in Kensington, found her rooms impossibly small, he wrote to her to ask her if she would not do him the favor of occupying his flat while he was away, which would give his two servants something to do and would allow him the possibility of staying away longer, perhaps until the summer? Alice gratefully consented. The “general reluctance” of landlords to rent to invalids limited her choices. “I would gladly give her [my flat], regularly, in winter,” he told Aunt Kate, “& spend my winters abroad; but that would end in my never seeing her.”¹⁶

When he moved into a hotel in town at the beginning of January 1887, his room was “flooded with the splendid sunshine” that replaced the December rains. The yellow Arno flowed beneath his window. He was briefly depressed to realize that despite being committed to London, he felt as if a great weight had been lifted from him whenever he was away from it. “The solution, of course, is to be in Italy when one can—not to live, in short, where one does live.” But that, he knew, was no solution at all. One needed to live where one was, with all one’s consciousness alert and active in the present. By the end of the month, he felt more alive again. His fear that his “love of Italy” had become an “extinct volcano” disappeared in an “eruption” of responsiveness. “I find that I am quite capable—to my extreme satisfaction—of enjoying the dear old country as much—almost—!!! as I ever did.”¹⁷ He found the “almost” inevitable. But “almost” was enough.

From the Hôtel du Sud, he had most of Florence within a short walk. January blessedly provided nothing but sunshine, though the weather was cold. He hardly went to look at paintings. “They make me melancholy mad. I only visit Michelangelo, who being mad himself, pushes me back into sanity.” He spent mornings at his table, writing the article on Stevenson and an article on London for The Century. It is his fullest expression of his awe at a city he found it difficult to live in but impossible to live without—nostalgically evoking “a certain evening … the end of a wet, black Sunday, twenty years ago, about the first of March [1869],” from which he dated his adult relationship with “the murky modern Babylon,” the “particular spot in the world which communicates the greatest sense of life,” the capital of the English language and of the literary life for a writer of English. More ideas for stories occurred to him, which he held in suspension in order to finish the articles, the money for which would help keep him abroad. When the daughter of General George McClellan, visiting in Venice, was surprised that her gossipy account, published in a New York newspaper, of the Venetian social life that she had experienced the previous autumn stirred up angry resentment among her Venetian hosts, he thought it a good idea for a story, “a pendant to Daisy Miller.” By mid-February, he had “been driving the pen very steadily.”18

But he had also been driving a social carriage to so many dinners that he felt repelled at the notion that he was being lionized and that he did not decline or at least resist many of the invitations. Though Florentine social life seemed a “thin polyglot world,” he found it difficult to say no, a victim of insufficient self-disgust and aesthetic snobbery. “I likewise leave a card on every woman on whose plain face (they are mainly deucedly ugly) my eyes happen involuntarily to have rested.” He felt pulled, like a spasmodic puppet, on the strings of habit and social convention, by boring “social importunities,” by his habit of saying yes, his insecurity about saying no. He saw friends more than he saw strangers, though even the Bootts sometimes got on his nerves. Francis was his old self grown decrepit, occasionally still eccentric and amusing, but more and more laboring under old age and displacement. He was managing the strangeness of Lizzie being married to Duveneck better than James had anticipated. The miraculous happened—or at least what would have seemed the impossible just a year or so before. Slim, passive, Lizzie at the age of forty gave birth to a son. “Lizzie Duveneck’s baby,” he wrote to Aunt Kate, “is a little red worm—but Lizzie herself is blooming & evidently most happy.… The baby will apparently live & thrive—but Lizzie will plainly be much more of a wife than of a mother. She is much in love with her husband—who will never do much, I think, but who is, all the same, a fine, pleasant polite (though perfectly illiterate) man, whom it is impossible not to like. I shouldn’t wonder if L. were to have still a blooming family.”¹⁹

James had two new friends in Florence—the highly regarded American-born doctor William Baldwin who, seven years younger than himself, had become a permanent resident of Florence, a valued, influential member of the American community—and the much younger, intellectually sharp, interestingly argumentative British writer, Violet Paget. Handsome and energetic, Baldwin was a brilliant diagnostician with an international reputation both for skill and boldness. Fortunately, at the moment, James had no need of his professional services, but he enjoyed his company immensely. Paget was a less companionable personality, whom he had met for the first time in London in summer 1884. Though she was not a great writer, he told Perry, she seemed to him “a most astounding young female, & Euphorion,” a book of essays on the Renaissance that she had just published, “most fascinating & suggestive, as well as monstrous clever.” A prolific and ambitious writer, the daughter of a British diplomat who published under the pen name of Vernon Lee, she made the mistake, in James’s eyes, of not only turning to fiction, where he thought her talents thin, but of dedicating her first “very radical & atheistic” novel to him. What he liked most about her Miss Brown was the vicarious pleasure of imagining the profits pouring in “with a delicious monotony.” Though he managed to be civil in response to the dedication, he resented being associated so publicly with a novel he disliked and took almost a year to thank her. When she expressed her pleasure at his forthcoming visit to Florence, he responded with his usual convoluted, evasive politeness.20

In Florence, he found her as “tigrish” as ever, her daily receiving hour actually three hours. She was often “at home” evenings as well; her drawing room was one of the most well attended in Florence. Her social and intellectual life was driven by her angry competition with her paralyzed half brother, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, a minor poet and former diplomat—“who is always in her salon, bedridden or rather sofa-ridden”—and by the constant presence of “a grotesque, deformed, invalidical posing little old mother, and a father in the highest degree unpleasant, mysterious and sinister, who walks all day, all over Florence, hates his stepson, and hasn’t sat down to table with his family for twenty years.” Finding Violet and her world more interesting than repelling, he visited regularly, the reward an intellectual liveliness and imaginative playfulness that he found nowhere else in Florence. Toward the middle of January 1887, while he was visiting her salon, he was introduced to Countess Gamba. Her husband was “a nephew of the Guiccioli,” Byron’s Venetian mistress, from whom they had inherited “a lot of Byron letters of which they are rather illiberal and dangerous guardians,” so Eugene Lee-Hamilton told the attentive James. “The Countess … says the letters … are discreditable to Byron; and H. elicited from her that she had burned one of them.” That night he jotted down in his notebook a story that Hamilton told him, prompted by his remarks about the countess, concerning a “Boston art-critic and Shelley-worshipper.… Miss Claremont, Byron’s ci-devant mistress (the mother of Allegra) [who] was living, until lately, here in Florence, at a great age, 80 or thereabouts, and with her lived her niece, a younger Miss Claremont—of about 50.” The critic “knew they had interesting papers—letters of Shelley’s and Byron’s—he had known it for a long time and cherished the idea of getting hold of them. To this end he laid the plan of going to lodge with the Misses Claremont—hoping that the old lady in view of her great age would die while he was there, so that he might then put his hand upon the documents.… ‘I will give you all the letters if you marry me!’”21

When James left Florence for Venice in late February, he began the transformation of the two anecdotes into one of his most compelling stories, “The Aspern Papers.” Though he had intended to go to Rome at the beginning of February 1887, he had stayed on in Florence. There would be too many people he knew in Rome. Also, he feared that he would be appalled by the widespread “destruction and vulgarization” of the city. Perhaps he lingered for the pleasure of some of his Florentine company. In Venice Katherine Bronson happily provided him with her guest rooms in Palazzo Giustinian-Recanati—the extension to Ca’ Alvisi in which Browning often stayed and which Browning’s son had just vacated—“a very snug and comfortable little apartment of several rooms, including a private theatre,” which may have seemed appropriate for a writer who still dreamed of theatrical success. In early March, Venice was brilliant. “The weather glows—the lagoon twinkles.… Venice—even at this crude season—is full of its old magic.” Then it began to rain, continuously. “Yesterday there were sinister carts in the Piazza and men who looked like Irishmen shovelling away snow. One was almost sorry to have left Boston.” At the middle of March, he became “miserably unwell for two weeks,” with a horrible headache, a urinary infection, and what was soon diagnosed as jaundice. It was “the longest illness I have had since I was laid up with typhoid fever, so many years ago, at Boulogne.” Between his health and the weather, Venice palled. Her “pestilent if romantic emanations” made him ill, he exaggerated, “for a month.” As soon as he felt well enough, he decided to return to Florence, preferably to the more quiet Bellosguardo, “to be out of the turmoil” of the city.²² Probably he missed Woolson and his other Florentine friends.

Other than at occasional moments of useful retrogression, he had been remarkably healthy for over ten years. Having developed sporadic gout, his feet sometimes swelled, and “a bad attack” occasionally got him out of an uninteresting invitation. Sometimes he would have “a savage neuralgic headache.” It usually disappeared after a few days, or even more quickly if he refrained from writing and allowed himself bedrest. Occasionally, his back bothered him, but more as a reminder or an excuse than as a realistic problem. One morning, in London in 1882, Gosse found him “stretched on the sofa.… His appearance gave me a little shock, for I had not thought of him as an invalid. He hurriedly and rather evasively declared that he was not, but that a muscular weakness of his spine obliged him, as he said, ‘to assume the horizontal posture’ during some hours of every day in order to bear the almost unbroken routine of evening engagements.… This weakness gradually passed away.… His manner was grave, extremely courteous, but a little formal and frightened, which seemed strange in a man living in constant communication with the world.”23 Gosse had little sense of the shyness and privateness behind the temporary withdrawal and the elaborate formality. Appearances to the contrary, the world with which he had most communication was the world of his imagination.

After seven weeks in Venice, he returned to Florence in mid-April 1887, to stay until the beginning of June, this time not to the Hôtel du Sud but to Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Villa Brichieri. With a servant, whom Woolson had hired, William Baldwin met him at the railroad station and drove him up to Bellosguardo, where Woolson made him comfortable in the apartment directly below hers. She had the first floor of the three-story, fourteen-room villa, he, the ground floor; she had the balcony and he, the garden. Both had a spectacular view. “Now that I am on terra firma—& high as well as firm I am quite as well as my perverse nature ever lets me be,” he wrote to a London friend on the day of his arrival. He did not tell her that he was sharing the villa with Fenimore. Keeping their arrangement as secret as possible, he omitted mention of it from his letters, though he did not attempt to conceal it from visitors and local friends. To Alice and William he said no more than that he had “taken some rooms at Bellosguardo.” Undoubtedly, he saw Fenimore every day. It was as much of a love affair with a woman as he was ever to have, a daily intimacy that protected daily privacy, that made no physical demands beyond courtesy, no emotional demands beyond friendship.

Baldwin attended to his health, Fenimore and Florence to his spirits. He limited his social life more than he had during his earlier stay. When he walked down into Florence, he strolled through the busy streets without being part of them, he made social calls and attended teas and dinners without the daily proximity that made invitations harder to decline. As he regained his strength, he began to walk most evenings down into Florence for an early dinner, ascending “back again in the balmy night” into the “light pure air.” He resumed his visits to the Paget salon. Visitors came, Hamilton Aïdé and Rhoda Broughton; the latter was a prolific popular novelist whom James had met in the mid-1870s and liked “in spite of her roughness.” She at first wrote audaciously frank, semi-autobiographical fiction about the problems of young women coming of age, and later satirically sharp, pessimistic novels. He adored living on Bellosguardo, where “the bells of Florence talk to you, at a distance, all day long.” Spring blossomed around him, colorfully, exuberantly. Every time he raised his head from his writing table at his “supercelestial” villa, the “most beautiful view on earth” filled his eyes and his spirit.24 In May, the Duomo festa brought pageantry, parades, costumes. Italy seemed glorious again.

Having returned from Venice with images of glittering canals and old palaces brightly fixed in his mind’s eye, he began to incorporate the two anecdotes that Lee-Hamilton had told him and the Venetian scenery that had dazzled him into a new story, which he wrote during April and May 1887 at the Villa Brichieri.²⁵ The two central characters of “The Aspern Papers,” the unnamed American narrator and the writer whose letters he desires to possess, were projections of aspects of himself. James sketched a career for the deceased and charismatic writer, Jeffrey Aspern, much like his own. In the relationship between the narrator and Tina Bordereau, who will give Aspern’s papers to him as a gift if he will marry her, James touched on one element of his relationship with Constance Woolson, resonating with his lifelong awareness of what he had gained and what he had sacrificed in his decision never to marry. Though the narrator is willing to lie, steal, perhaps even murder, to possess Aspern’s papers, he recoils at and rejects the one sure strategy for obtaining what he covets. Marriage, for this narrator, to Tina, or to anyone, is out of the question. He fears marriage more than he loves Aspern. The homoerotic sensibility that allows him to love Aspern recoils from the commitment that he must make if he is to marry Tina. Since his only route to possess Aspern is through a heterosexuality at odds with his nature, he finds, like James, that he cannot quite have either. It is one of James’s most narcissistic stories of the problem of divided self-love.

As a schemer, the narrator is an utter failure, insufficiently cunning, ruthless, or bold to carry off his plot successfully. Immature and unsophisticated in his passion for Aspern, he is caught in an infantile fixation that damages his adult life. He makes too much of the Aspern-Bordereau relationship, investing it with a distinctiveness that implies his own emotional retrogression rather than a healthy critical mind or a strong imaginative vision. His scheme from the beginning is seriously flawed, the one alternative of those available to him least likely to succeed. He does not perceive that all such machinations depend on a complicity, silent or otherwise, between the victimizer and the victimized, and that the victimizer must pay a price for his success. The narrator, who wants to be Aspern, can only assume that power through possessing Aspern’s papers. The lust for the papers suggests for James the dangers and the attractions of a man desiring to possess another man, of the ultimate union, literary and erotic, between Henry senior and Henry junior, between father and son, between master and disciple.

With a typescript of about half the “Aspern Papers” in hand and the manuscript of the remainder being typed in London, he went again in late May 1887 to Venice, staying for a month, “very happy in this effulgent steam-bath,” as a guest of the Curtises in their “magnificent old palace—all marbles and frescoes and portraits of Doges—a delightful habitation for hot weather.” A wealthy Bostonian, almost old enough to be James’s father, who had been imprisoned briefly for assault after hitting a discourteous fellow passenger on a Boston train, Daniel Curtis had permanently exiled himself, vowing never to return to America. His exile was luxuriously cushioned, from 1881, by Venetian comforts, and then the purchase of the Palazzo Barbaro in 1885. He seemed to have brought Beacon Street to the Grand Canal. His anecdotes, James joked, were “unboreable—or unbearable.” Even worse, the Curtises “can’t keep their hands off their native land—and their perpetual digs at it fanned (if a dig can fan) my patriotism to a fever.”26 Like her husband, Ariana Curtis was literary without being talented, hospitable without being suffocating. Though he had intended to stay ten days, he stayed a month, working in the cool, vaulted upstairs library, lounging in the unusually spacious garden, developing affection for his obstreperous hosts, becoming even more enamored of Venice than he had been before.

From Florence, James had asked the Curtises to be hospitable to Bourget, who was in Venice, working on a new novel. “You may not (or rather certainly will not …) like his novels if you know them—but he is … one of the most pleasing minds, to me, of the younger generation of Frenchmen.” Late in June, Bourget told him about a beautiful young friend of his who had committed suicide in Rome by jumping “out of the window … in her night-dress … while in the delirium of fever,” which he was to make slight use of in “Two Countries.” With Bourget, with the Curtises, with working mornings, sensually quiescent, summer-hot afternoons, and refreshingly cool evenings in large marble rooms or gliding along on the canals, the days passed quickly. He felt he could possess his “soul there; & I adored it & came near taking a little cheap permanent pied a terre … (which was offered me) as an occasional asylum: but didn’t—for all sorts of reasons—mainly the fear that if I had a link my love would turn to hate.” It was a recurring temptation over the next decade, the fantasy of alternating London with Venice, of a permanent place of his own with a balcony overlooking a canal, where he could watch the gondolas and the handsome gondoliers drift by. But he feared the commitment, both the expense and the routinization. He also feared the sensual relaxation, the emotional complications of a world less restrained by Anglo-Saxon propriety, the fantasies and fantastic images provoked by “the flicker of the canal on [the] gilded roof” of the Palazzo Barbaro.27

( 4 )

He needed to return to London, partly because he had responsibilities there: to his sister, whom he had not seen for seven months; to his apartment, which Alice was about to vacate for a return to Leamington; to his clubs, his friends, and his publisher. He needed to get out of Italy at least to escape the summer heat. Having stayed in Venice two weeks more than he had initially intended, he pursued what he had told Violet Paget, before leaving for Venice, “was his small shy plan of returning” to Florence briefly. He admitted that he “hated good-byes,” and did his best to “evade them by subtle arts.” After two weeks in Florence, the heat began to become oppressive. He managed to say his hated good-byes to the Bootts and to Woolson. Having promised to stay briefly with Fanny Kemble at Stresa on Lake Maggiore, he went early in July 1887 from Florence to Lugano, where he picked up mail that Woolson had forwarded to him, then to Stresa, where he found his old and aging friend “more & more an extinct volcano—the shadow of her former self.” Whenever he was away from London, he worried about her and missed her. He had not seen for eight months the friend whom in London he saw “regularly one night a week,” and the changes were noticeable. Also, the heat was unbearable. “I roasted at Stresa,” he told Sarah Wister, “in your mother’s company.… I deplored [her] putting herself at that season into the transalpine oven; but her perversities, as you know, are not less magnificent than her rectitudes.” Crossing the Alps in the middle of the month, he went directly, “with only 2 or 3 short stops,” to De Vere Gardens. He returned with the high hope that these eight months in Italy had been the first in a series of annual migrations—London from July to March, Italy from April to June.²⁸

Returning to London in July 1887, he rediscovered his comfortable breezy apartment, which Alice had left “in lovely order.” He was pleased to have familiar elbowroom and to enjoy the sunny western windows, with “splendid awnings everywhere.” He went almost immediately to Leamington to see Alice, who looked remarkably well “& in all her usual serene not to say brilliant spirits.” He made some short country visits, spending a pastoral afternoon with Sarah Wister’s sister, a few days with Frank Millet at Broadway, a week in September, “half pleasant, half insupportable,” with the Roseberys in the “gilded halls” of Mentmore. He joined Lowell for three days at Whitby, in Yorkshire, experiencing weather so magnificent that he imagined that the long dead summers of his American childhood had come to life again. Lowell seemed as simple, amiable, “expressively kind as ever.” No longer ambassador, he had returned to England semipermanently. “He very kindly knocked at my door the morning after my return,” James told Grace Norton. With Mrs. Smalley to take care of him, he seemed happy. “I dined with him yesterday,” he wrote to Grace Norton, “and she was there—in red velvet—and not her husband. But it is all right and most excellent for both of them.”29

London entertained him again, dinners with Lowell, Du Maurier, the Smalleys, Mrs. Mason, Mrs. Lodge, late night tête-à-têtes with Fanny Kemble, parties, gossip, anecdotes, relationships, and situations that stirred his sympathy, his values, and his sharply observant novelistic imagination. “My rooms are perfect for quiet work, & quiet work is more & more all I care for. Staying with people is more & more onerous to me.” He felt keenly the commercial failure of both The Bostonians and the Princess. Having fallen on “evil days,” he felt impatient that the essays and stories he had written over the past year had not yet been published, as if somehow The Century and other magazines were conspiring to publish belatedly. He wanted to reestablish his presence, his desirability, to put out of everyone’s minds the recent failures. “I hope during the next ten years to do some things of a certain importance; if I don’t, it won’t be that I haven’t tried or that I am wanting in an extreme ambition. I am able to work better, and more than I have ever been in my life before.” His productivity during his Italian months had been, he felt, substantial. He had done essays on Woolson, Stevenson, and London; and four or five stories, including “The Aspern Papers.” He felt there was no end to his energy. He wanted to continue to do short pieces—like the brief article on Sargent he was now writing, to which he soon added an article on the Broadway group—to write short stories, to publish novels. He had in mind a brief novel that would highlight the deleterious universality of the journalistic mentality represented by “the odious ‘Pall Mall,’” and a longer novel, to be called The Tragic Muse, “about half as long (thank God!) as the Princess,” which he haltingly began in early autumn 1887. By March 1888, he had agreed that it would be much longer than he had originally planned and be published as a yearlong serial in the Atlantic.30 Financially, it was a sensible decision.

When, in autumn 1887, Katherine Loring left for Boston, with the likelihood of a long absence, he felt the possibility of Italy that next spring slipping away. Katherine’s “existence,” Alice wrote to Aunt Kate, “must be a mild purgatory. Some day the rights of women will be respected, I suppose.” So too was Henry’s “a mild purgatory.” For him, Katherine’s departure meant he must again become “the angel of the house,” his sister’s nurse. For Alice, Katherine’s absence was hell. She “has been wrenched away from me and has now definitely passed from within my horizon for years.… I am stranded here until my bones fall asunder, unless some magic transformation takes place in my state.” Her health immediately deteriorated. Having just returned from Geneva to Florence, Constance Woolson sent her compassionate sympathy. She also had been ill and depressed, some unspecified “dreary autumn illness” compounded by hard work and loneliness. In October, she indirectly wrote to Alice from Bellosguardo through Katherine, unaware that Katherine had left for America, that she was “grieved to hear that Miss James has been suffering. Tell her that an exclamation burst from me irresistibly, night before last—namely—‘I wish she were here this minute!’ [Lizzie Boott] was paying me a visit, & we were speaking of Miss James. The broad doors stood wide open; the moonlight outside lighted up my old garden, & the dark, rugged outline of Hawthorne’s tower; perfume from a thousand flowers filled the room; & I was so happy to be here that it was almost wickedness! It seemed to me, then, that if Miss James’ couch could be drawn across that door, she would enjoy it so much. And she would not be wicked. (I hear her exclaiming, ‘Yes, I should!’)”³¹

By the beginning of the year, Alice’s health had improved. The quiet winter at Leamington suited her. “She will probably remain there a long time yet,” Henry wrote to Lizzie Boott.… “Katherine L. is tied to America by all sorts of complications of illness among her near relatives. I shall not be able to go abroad for any time, more than a fortnight or so—as long as she is beyond the seas.… I am also a pere de famille—my little brood increases always—& I have no babies—but have to do it all myself.” In the late winter and through the spring of 1888, Alice was “distressingly ill,” which put off Italy indefinitely. When, in November 1887, the Bootts went to Paris for the winter, he regretted that he could not take time to join them there. He heard regularly from the Villa Brichieri, happy that Fenimore had “almost recovered.” When London became enveloped by wintry fog and darkness, he felt a reawakened sense of the comfort of withdrawal, of London winters as lamplight, cozy fires, and privacy. “One looks within, because there is nothing to look at without & one fishes old fancies out of one’s mind & dresses them up as one can.” By Christmas, though, it seemed “blacker & more acridly smoky than even my tolerant spirit can stand.… I suppose,” he told John Clark, that “the ice is on your windows & the snow upon your [Scottish] hills; & a purer mixture than I descry from my high casement, on the virtuous housetops of Kensington.” One of the minor bright flares was the appearance of Coquelin on the London stage in seven or eight comedies, “including things he doesn’t do in Paris.… I had really a fete of his three weeks. He came to lunch with me one day … & talked for two hours. As it was about his own matters he talked admirably well—but at the bottom of every comedian there is a ferocious sickening vacuity.” During Coquelin’s six months in London, he saw a good deal of the “insupportable man.” London, though, hardly seemed “the capital of pleasure.” The Home Rule question fouled the air even further. “How glad I am that I loathe politics and journalism—they justify one’s loathing so, from hour to hour, that I shld. be ashamed of myself if I had ever liked them.”32 Whatever the outer weather, he was not in high spirits. Work came slowly. The winter wore on.

Suddenly, in March 1888, he had “an unspeakable shock.” After a short bout with pneumonia, “dear little quiet, gentle, intelligent laborious” Lizzie Boott unexpectedly died in Paris. “I shall miss her greatly,” he mourned, the friend whom he had known for almost twenty-four years, whom he had met in happy, hopeful days all those years ago in Newport. He believed that two of the labors she had died of were marriage and parenthood. His loyalty was to the devastated Francis, who now found himself bound to his son-in-law by a grandson whose mother had left him to the care of two men who had nothing in common but what they had lost. James had never for a moment imagined that Lizzie would die before her father. “It is essentially true that she had undertaken an effort beyond her strength, that she staggered under it and was broken down by it. I was conscious of this as long ago,” he claimed to the grieving Francis, “as during those months in Florence when superficially she seemed so happy and hopeful … the terrible specific gravity of the mass she had proposed to float and carry.—It is no fault of his—but simply the stuff he is made of.” As with Minny Temple’s, he saw Lizzie’s death as the only possible solution to her situation, to the impossibility of her carrying the heavy weight of Duveneck. He consoled himself with an imagined inevitability that made her death somehow seem almost a constructive resolution of disharmonies.

But no rationalization could hold back his tears. He felt “bewildered at the violence of the change,” and he imagined that when in the future he looked from Bellosguardo at the rooftops of Florence, he would still feel the violence of Lizzie’s sudden departure. “I shall see her there, always more than anything else.” Unlike Minny, she had not prepared those around her for her death by a lengthy period of illness. The change had taken him by surprise, dislocated his responsiveness. Writing immediately to Duveneck, he offered to come to Paris. But apparently Duveneck had no more need of James than James of him. Lizzie’s ashes were taken to Italy for burial “in the dear old Florentine earth—the place where it is best to think of her sleeping, since sleep, forever, she does. That is another complication—of feeling—for I should have liked much to have been able to stand by her grave.” But he did not feel he could leave Alice, who was suffering through the spring a series of breakdowns as extreme as she had ever experienced. “The fact that Lizzie has gone,” Alice wrote to a mutual friend of their youth, “still eludes one & will ever remain one of the most inscrutable freaks of providence. It has surely been the only violent action of her life.” For Henry, such an “inscrutable freak” could best be expressed in the terms that meant most to him. “With what an absence of style,” he told Ariana Curtis, “does the world appear to be ruled.” In May 1888, as the spring blossomed, Lizzie was buried—“Many people and mountains of flowers. Boott absolutely calm—& Duveneck sobbing.” Though he felt strongly the loss of not attending the funeral, letters from Florence—from Woolson, among others—made the scene vivid in his mind. Worried about Francis, he felt “great satisfaction,” he told him, in knowing that you are within [Fenimore’s] bountiful sphere.” A week after Lizzie’s death, he went to one of the Rothschild houses for the Easter weekend. The house was full of people. “So life goes on,” he told Henrietta Reubell, a fellow mourner who was on the scene in Paris, “even when death, close beside one, punches black holes in it.”33

After a summer of quiet recuperation and an autumn of work and London companionship, by October 1888 he was eager to get out of London. The summer had been unusually dark and cold, “rank with rheumatism.” In early August, as if in imaginative identification with Fenimore, he had “a seizure of deafness, which became very bad.” Fortunately, it “proved to be catarrhal & curable.… The town is empty,” he complained, “but I am not going away. I have no money, but I have a little work.” In fact, he had a great deal of work, some short stories recently completed, The Tragic Muse just under way. To keep him company at home, he had bought his first dog, a small Scotch terrier, whom he named Tosca and extolled as “the light of my eyes.” He had also had enjoyable human companionship—three days in September at Broadway with Sargent, who had returned from America “very big & strong & red & flannelly & lawn tennisy & well, & … with him his younger sister [Emily], whom he used … as a model for lying on boats.… She was jocosely plaintive & they were both charming.” He frequently took Sunday walks, especially to Hampstead to visit Du Maurier with a new friend, Jean Jules Jusserand, a French diplomat and scholar, “a little prodigy of literary & diplomatic achievement.… He is only 33 & he has written admirably on early English literature & manners & made his way wonderfully in the French foreign office.… He is alive to his very small finger tips, ambitious, capable & charming—& if he were a few inches less diminutive I should believe that Europe would hear of him as a diplomatic personage. But he is too short! Up to a certain point, or rather down to it, shortness, I think, constitutes a presumption of greatness—but below that point not.” Though the walk up to Hampstead, “which used to be so rural & pretty,” had become “all red brick & cockney prose,” he enjoyed the aging Du Maurier’s company, strolling on the heath with his “pretty daughters … & his little dogs. Then we go home & dine with him … & walk back to London at 10 o’clock.” Du Maurier’s great success, Trilby, he liked rather than admired. “I love the man & want to like what he does—so amateurishly & formlessly, but with such charming good faith & such an infusion of a tender, lovable personality.” It made no difference to his friend that Du Maurier’s work had grown “weak & monotonous (narrow) with time.… He is personally & conversationally the pleasantest creature.”34

Sick of London, from which he had not been away, except for brief country visits, for fourteen months, he arranged to join Fenimore in Geneva in October 1888. Once he expressed his intention to go abroad, Alice strongly encouraged him, though he did not tell her about his arrangement with Woolson, just as he told Aunt Kate, William, and Grace Norton no more than that he expected “to go abroad for about a month—most of which I shall probably spend in Paris.” This was discretion with a clear intention to deceive. Leaving London before the middle of October, he went directly to Geneva, where he and Fenimore stayed at separate hotels—connected by a short boat ride across the narrow lake—his own rooms a portion of the apartment in the Hôtel de l’Écu that he had stayed in with his family as a boy of sixteen in the winter of 1859-1860. “À propos of honey,” he told Frederick Macmillan, whose wife had given him a pot as a departure gift, “this place looks as lovely to me as ever—& the ‘little change,’ as they say in London, is already doing me good.” Having sought out the ghosts of the past, he soon found them congenial. “I am sitting in our old family salon,” he wrote to William, “and have sat here most of the time for the last fortnight, in sociable conversation with family ghosts—father and mother and Aunt Kate and our juvenile selves.” The weather was stunningly beautiful, filled with autumn colors that reminded him of America. He did “some quiet work,” took “some quiet walks,” looked “at the admirable blue gush & rush of the Rhone and at the chaîne des Alpes, which has been, every blessed day, fantastically near, clear & fair.” He excluded from most of his correspondence that much of this was being done in Fenimore’s company. They dined together every evening. He had never before been quite as fond of Geneva. “You share my odd & perverse taste for Geneva,” he disingenuously wrote Henrietta, who had hoped that he would be in Paris by then. “I am fond of it—ça me rappelle mes jeunes années” [“it reminds me of my early years”].35

If his intention had been to spend only a month abroad, he had already spent three weeks of it in Geneva. At the end of October, he told Ariana Curtis that he was about to leave Geneva for Italy, for two weeks on the Italian Riviera near Genoa, perhaps to conclude with a short stay in Monte Carlo. It was unlikely, alas, that he would go farther south. But he had left London with the claim that he would be away only a month. He had said that he would spend most of it in Paris. Now, instead of going to Paris, he declared for the Italian Riviera and Monte Carlo. His schedule varied with his correspondents. In Geneva through October and beyond, he felt apparently as happy as he had ever felt before. Despite telling Ariana Curtis at the end of October that he was “just bringing to a close a stay of three weeks in this half lovable, half detestable little city,” he and Fenimore stayed until mid-November. He felt “cradled into a sort of sentimental good-humour by old, or rather by young, associations. I spent a goodish bit of my early years here, & still feel sociably & affectionately toward certain Genevese things. I came abroad wanting to be quiet & rather unsociable—so I dodged Paris & didn’t stop till I got here, where I have staid & where my only complications have been to look at the Mont Blanc chain, visible uninterruptedly far … & extraordinarily clear & near & fair, hanging over the bright blue lake.… The autumn-tints … have vied in multi-colouration with those of the jewellers’ windows in the Rue du Rhône.”³⁶

Leaving Geneva for the Riviera and Genoa about the middle of November 1888, he disarmingly assured a mutual friend that Miss Woolson “is well and flourishing I know.” Her address was “Villa Brichieri, Bellosguardo, Florence.” Whether she went with him to Genoa is unclear. She may have gone directly back to Bellosguardo, as he told Francis Boott, though the route would easily have accommodated their traveling together as far as Genoa. He spent two weeks in Genoa and Monte Carlo, going north to “that terrible Paris,” as he joked to the impatient Henrietta, almost at the end of November. By early November, Alice had discovered the truth, which she shared with William and Kate. “Henry is somewhere on the continent flirting with Constance,” she told Aunt Kate. To William, at the end of the first week of December 1888, she put it more strongly. “Henry has been galavanting on the continent with a she-novelist, when I remonstrated he told me he thought it a ‘mild excess.’” Apparently, Alice either knew or assumed that they had traveled together to Genoa and Monte Carlo. A few days after Alice’s letter, Fenimore wrote, without mention of Henry, to one of her oldest, dearest American friends. “I am quite scandalously well this winter. Haven’t had an ill moment; & am stout as can be. I am so much better—my health so much firmer—than it used to be that it is really quite remarkable. I was ill last winter; but that was owing to mental depression.”37 They parted apparently in excellent spirits, with the expectation that they would see one another soon. She would visit London. He hoped to go to Italy the next spring.

( 5 )

From his high perch above the dark London streets, he looked down, as New Year’s Day, 1889, approached, at what appeared a Christmas season almost without joy, a holiday that there seemed few reasons for England to celebrate. The view was Dickensian in the most unhappy way. London “seemed all foul fog, sordid mud, vile low black brick, impenetrable English density & irrecoverably brutal & miserable lower classes!” For the first time, he saw, with a distaste and a moral conscience that challenged its attractions, “the vast miseries and meannesses of London.” He personalized the discomfort and the ugliness. His body ached with flu, his head was feverish, his pains were sharp. London winter heaviness seemed even to weigh down his imagination. “I miss … the relief & refreshment that would come from an occasional skip or jump upward, a flutter of the wings. Nowhere & in nobody & nothing does one find that here; & one’s own gifts decline & lower their level & standard!” What he had come to London for, London no longer seemed to provide. The freshness of the experience had worn away, “the glamour, the prestige and the mystery.” England seemed “frumpy,” tattered. He felt the accumulated “simple solid rust” of thirteen years of London life. His imagination could no longer sustain his initial vision. He appreciated the spaciousness, with its three bedrooms and three sitting rooms, of his De Vere Gardens flat. “It is everything to me.” Having “worked through a good many superfluities & vanities (not valueless in their hour),” his social commitments were more controlled, his time more at his command.38 But, from the time of his return to London in late 1888, the balance had changed.

The economic balance had changed strikingly for the better, though he was to discover unhappily that the improvement would be short-lived. He was almost never again to earn as much money as he earned that year. For a moment, though, it seemed as if he could put the commercial failure of his two previous novels behind him. Before leaving for Geneva, he had finished a short novel, The Reverberator, which appeared from February to July 1888 in Macmillan’s Magazine. From Houghton Mifflin in Boston he received twenty-two hundred dollars as half of the advance against the publication in the Atlantic of The Tragic Muse, which he had begun writing in spring 1888.³⁹ The Atlantic published “The Aspern Papers”; The Fortnightly Review, his essay on “Maupassant” and an article on Pierre Loti; The Century, his essay on Stevenson, a story, “The Liar,” and a review of the works of the Goncourt brothers; Harper’s, “Two Countries”; Scribner’s, “A London Life”; The Universal Review, a story, “The Lesson of the Master”; The English Illustrated Magazine, a story, “The Patagonia”; and, finally, The Century, his long essay on “London.” It is a dazzling list.

But there was still more. With Macmillan, he negotiated the publication of two volumes of his recent stories, reprocessing them as quickly as possible into additional cash. “The Aspern Papers” made a volume, published with two other stories, in September 1888. “An essential part of the idea, for me, is to have some money,” he had bluntly told Macmillan. He proposed another volume, which would contain “A London Life” and three other stories. “My aspiration in regard to these two volumes … will not have been fulfilled unless I receive something ‘down,’ a certain sum in advance, of course I mean, on that 15 percent royalty which I should otherwise have a long time to wait for.” To obtain the advance, he gently twisted Macmillan’s arm and stretched the literal, though not the emotional, truth. He genuinely felt poor. “I am settling down to write a longish novel (it begins in the Atlantic in January next & runs a year) so that for the next few months I shall be engaged on work without immediate return—a strain I am sorry to say that I am not, just now, rich enough easily to stand. I may be asking something so unusual that it is impossible—but without asking I can’t know. If it is consistent with your powers to make me such an advance as will ease off the said strain, I shall greatly appreciate the heroics to yours ever.”40

It was an extraordinary year, in which, his name constantly before the public on both sides of the Atlantic, he pocketed almost nine thousand dollars, and with far less discomfort in the negotiations than had ever been the case before. He had finally put his business interests into the hands of one of the first well-known practitioners of a new profession. In early 1888, on Gosse’s recommendation, James hired A. P. Watt to handle his business affairs. Watt had established a reputation as the business representative of numbers of well-known writers, including Rider Haggard, Bret Harte, and Wilkie Collins. “He appeared eager to undertake me, & I am promised remarkable good results from it. He is to make one’s bargains & take charge of one’s productions generally—but especially over here. He takes 10 percent of what he gets for me, but I am advised that his favorable action … more than makes up for this—& that even if it didn’t the relief & comfort of having him take all the mercenary & selling side off one’s mind is well worth the cost. I debated a long time, but the other day he came to see me, & after a talk seemed so much impressed with the fact that I have done much less well for myself than I ought to … that I entered into relations with him.”

But neither employing a literary agent nor his personal relationship with Macmillan saved James the disappointment of finding that neither Macmillan nor any other publisher was willing to pay for The Tragic Muse what he thought the novel was worth. Naturally, he evaluated the market value of his fiction in terms of personal and professional pride, whereas Macmillan evaluated worth in terms of sales. In the past, he had thrown in extra measures of cooperation and money—because of his respect for James as a writer and for personal reasons—but he had lost more money on James’s two previous novels than he could comfortably absorb. In March 1890, The Tragic Muse having completed its serialization in the Atlantic, James solicited an offer. When Macmillan responded with nothing down and two-thirds profit in the future, James articulated a fact that Macmillan knew all too well. “That future is practically remote and I am much more concerned with the present. What I desire is to obtain a sum of money ‘down.’” He would try other publishers if necessary. Macmillan then offered a seventy pound advance. “Don’t … think my pretentions monstrous,” James told him, “if I say that in spite of what you tell me of the poor success of my recent books, I still do desire to get a larger sum, and have determined to take what steps I can in this direction. These steps I know will carry me away from you, but it comes over me that that is after all better, even with a due and grateful recognition of the readiness you express to go on with me, unprofitable as I am.… Farewell then, my dear Macmillan, with great regret.”41

Relenting, Macmillan again did the “heroic” thing, which amounted to a lease agreement for which, in return for an immediate payment of £250, the publisher was to have all profits from The Tragic Muse for a period of five years. At the end of the period, he was to regain only £80 of the £250 he had paid out. James had been gradually feeling his market value declining, his English audience drifting away. Though he had received the handsome sum of forty-four hundred dollars from the Atlantic for the serial rights for The Tragic Muse, no English periodical wanted to purchase it. He had the unhappy sense that Macmillan had done all that he reasonably could. The high income he had earned in 1888, he clearly saw, had been the product of extraordinary productivity, particularly the creation and reprocessing of short stories and articles. Articles he wrote primarily to make money to allow him to have sustained free periods in which to write novels. Short stories he deeply believed in. They had integrity, high artistic challenges, and value. But he did not want to write only short fiction, though he tried to rationalize what might be a necessity into a virtue, into a high artistic strategy. After a lunch in May 1889 with Du Maurier, Jusserand, and the famous French literary critic, aesthetician, and philosopher, Hippolyte Taine, he suddenly felt a revived, refreshed interest in the short story. Taine had been talking about Turgenev’s short stories with high praise. The conversation did “me a world of good,” he told his notebook, “confirming, consecrating, as it were, the wish and dream that have lately grown stronger than ever in me—the desire that the literary heritage, such as it is, poor thing … shall consist of a large number of perfect short things, ‘nouvelles’ and tales, illustrative of ever so many things in life—in the life I see and know and feel.”⁴² The high ambition at least partly reflected the low and declining market for his novels.

As brilliantly as he sometimes managed the challenges of the short story as a form, he constantly felt pressured by the economy it demanded and by the predetermined lengths established by editors—by the necessity to be briefer than his energy and artistic ideas could comfortably adjust to. “I fear,” he complained to himself, “that with all the compression in the world I can’t do it in so very short a compass” as one of his editors demanded. He invoked the inspiration of Maupassant, the writer whom he thought most triumphant in the short story form. Having met Maupassant through Flaubert in Paris in 1875, he had renewed his acquaintance with him, particularly in the summer of 1886, when Maupassant had visited England. James entertained him at dinner, introduced him to Du Maurier and Gosse, and took him to Waddesdon to visit the Rothschilds. As with the other French realist writers, James admired Maupassant’s artistry but not his morals. The French writer was celebrated for his love affairs. When Maupassant told him ribald stories, James never forgot them, particularly the story of a triangular love relationship between two men and a monkey. In London, in summer 1886, with one of his beautiful mistresses, Blanche Roosevelt, Maupassant embarrassed James in a restaurant by urging him to approach an attractive stranger and tell her that Maupassant wanted to have sex with her. James declined. When Maupassant wanted James to make the request of a second lady, he declined again. When Maupassant then wanted him to ask a third lady, James fled.43 But he did not flee an appreciation of Maupassant’s artistry, nor his brilliance as a short story writer, which transcended the moral distastefulness of some of his subjects and which James celebrated in an appreciative essay in March 1888. To enjoy Maupassant, one needed to accept him on his own terms, James argued. He was willing to do so. His occasional hesitation never prevented him from elevating the uniqueness of genius over commonplace morality. He urged himself to take inspiration from Maupassant’s genius as a writer of short fiction, though with an intensity that expressed his sense of defeat in marketing his own novels and his discomfort with the limitations of the short story form.

Still, he needed the income from short fiction. In fact, he felt so strongly the necessity to increase his income that he agreed to write four articles during 1888-1889, which slowed him in his progress on The Tragic Muse, and agreed, at the end of 1889, to devote much of the first three months of 1890 to translating for Harper’s an unpublished novel by Alphonse Daudet. “I was bribed with gold—more gold than the translator (as I suppose) is accustomed to receive.” But he also realized that he sometimes made unwise, even economically unrealistic decisions. “It was really stupid, and it was needless, to consent,” he reminded himself, in February 1889, in regard to the four essays.⁴⁴ It galled him that he had last worked on The Tragic Muse in the autumn of 1888. But without sufficient payment for his work, he felt economically squeezed. Worse than that, he felt a failure, both personally and professionally humiliated. At a time in his life and career when he had anticipated that he would have not only “name and fame” but ample money as well, he felt it was humiliating not so much to ask for more but to be offered less than met his financial and emotional needs.

He had sacrificed much for his art, including, at least in conscious consideration, marriage and fatherhood. He dramatized the sacrifice in a gripping, tightly focused short story, “The Lesson of the Master.” Transforming a raw anecdote told him by Theodore Child into a delicately ironic presentation of his own situation, James provides in Henry St. George a version of his own sense of having done too much hackwork over the years, his position as a senior writer whom young writers admiringly consulted, and his fear that his new work might be inferior to his old. The ironic turn is that whereas Henry St. George has been rewarded with affluence, “the angelic Harry” had still to struggle for money. In the young, talented Paul Overt—whose admiration for St. George turns to suspicious resentment when the elder writer marries the woman he himself loves after having advised Overt that marriage is incompatible with a literary career—James neatly, ironically, devastatingly, turns the tables on himself. He delicately exposes the unhappiness of his own situation, in which he feels that he has neither the commercial success of Henry St. George nor the artistic integrity of Paul Overt. Unlike Paul Overt, though, James had unequivocally made it clear that he would not and could not fall in love with a woman in a way that implied a union and a consummation.

In The Tragic Muse, which he began to publish in the Atlantic in January 1889, a gifted portrait painter, Nick Dormer, modeled partly on Sargent, declines to subordinate his artistic mission to a career in politics, though it means the loss of the woman he genuinely loves and of the immense wealth that he would obtain by marrying her. In contrast to his aesthetic friend Gabriel Nash, Nick, as a portrait painter, envisions art as a representation of, and interaction with, the world of people and things. With touches of Oscar Wilde, who appears in diffused ways in some of the ideas of the novel and in some of the metaphors, Nash wants to make his life a work of art. He wants to live life at the highest level of pure flame, like a Paterean bright light that burns without being consumed or consuming, without a product, without a thing to be called a work of art other than the artist himself. Nick wants to create paintings that can be sold. When he imagines that his portrait of Miriam Rooth as The Tragic Muse is fading away into blankness, he is bewildered, perhaps less so than James would have been if he had read Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which began appearing in Lippincott’s Magazine in July 1890. The latter may have been in part a contrapuntal, slanted response by Wilde to The Tragic Muse, whose serial publication was completed in May 1890 and which was published in book form early in June. But Dormer has a Jamesian, not a Wildean, moral and aesthetic problem. In one of his early notes for The Tragic Muse, James puts Dormer’s dilemma quite clearly. Julia “virtually says to Nick: ‘You have great talent—you may have a great future. But you have no money, and you can do nothing without that. I have a great fortune and it shall be yours.’ … She appears soft, seductive—but in it all there lurks her condition—her terms.… He feels this—feels the condition.”45

In March 1889, while still in the early stages of writing The Tragic Muse, James saw Sargent’s “absolutely magnificent portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth.” It is the kind of painting that Nick Dormer aspires to create. In the painting, Ellen Terry is as “beautiful as an image.” On the stage, he thought her “abominable as an actress.” But in the riveting portrait, “she is clad in splendid peacock-blue robes, with a cobalt background, like an enamel or a figure in a missal or a mosaic, & with her wondrous green mantle, her iridescent garments, her huge, wild red braids (of dyed horsehair) hanging to her feet, her shining barbaric crown which, with a grand movement of the arms, she is placing on her head—and with, above all, her wondrous pale, fatal, painted, terrible face—half-Medusa, half-Rossetti, with light-coloured eyes & scarlet lips—she is a very distinguished person indeed & a very prodigious image. It is a noble picture—very strange, very bold, the result of a wonderfully vivid & direct vision of what he wanted to do & a still more wonderful ability to render it.”⁴⁶ On the less histrionic stage of The Tragic Muse, the young actress Miriam Rooth embodies a contemporary aesthetic version of Lady Macbeth’s ambition and dedication.

Having fallen in love with Miriam, the conservative young diplomat Peter Sherringham, for whom the theatre is an ambivalent passion, finds that she will not give up the stage to marry him. She proposes that he give up the diplomatic service to marry her. With touches of an evocation of what the young Fanny Kemble might have been like, perhaps also with Sarah Bernhardt in mind, James portrays in Miriam Rooth an actress of dedication, strength, and immense ambition. In the end, she marries the innocuous, slightly foolish Basil Dashwood, a theatre manager and theatre businessman. She marries him to protect herself from the attention of other men and because he can take care of the business of her career. Unlike Verena Tarrant, her sense of herself—her powers and her ambition—matches her performance talents. If she is ruthless, she must be so to accomplish her artistic ends.

( 6 )

Frustrated with his commercial failure as a novelist, desperate for money and for public fame, James turned to the theatre. It was only a half turn, prompted by an unsolicited request in December 1888 from a minor actor and producer, Edward Compton, to consider writing a stage version of The American, a novel that had been out of his mind and interest for many years. Though he had never met Compton, whose acting company mainly toured the provinces, he had years before met his wife, the former Virginia Bateman, an American actress who frequently performed the female lead in the company’s productions. “I remember Mrs. Compton perfectly,” he told her husband.47 Compton’s request fell on the fertile ground of past fantasies and present disappointments.

Since his unproduced stage adaptation of Daisy Miller, James had believed that there could be no possibility of commercial success for serious, aesthetically ambitious drama. When asked in 1884 to write a stage version of The Portrait of a Lady, he had responded that he would consider writing either an original play or an adaptation of a different novel in the near future “on the chance that if you should like it, it would open the door to my acquiring a goodish sum of money.” In The Tragic Muse, Gabriel Nash expresses James’s distaste for the “basest concessions” that a playwright who hopes to be produced must make to an audience that demands that the evening’s business be limited by the time “between dinner and the suburban train.” James took weeks before responding positively to Compton’s request. “Much occupied & preoccupied for the moment,” he had asked Compton for a few weeks to think it over. It had already been suggested “three or four times (on the last occasion three or four months ago,) & the objections, in every case, appear[ed] to me greater than the inducements.” He would give him “a yes or no” shortly.⁴⁸ Who had made these suggestions he nowhere says. Perhaps he had in mind to encourage Compton with competition. Whatever hesitation he had was soon overwhelmed by the fantasy of being a wildly applauded author and his hope that now, finally, was his chance to make a great deal of money.

James had long ago developed the habit of feeling poor. His poverty was especially the ache of emptiness, of disappointment. He did not hesitate to express his feelings to close friends. Gosse knew his friend’s mind in the late 1880s. “He was disappointed—he made no secret to his friends of his disillusion—in the commercial success of his novels, which was inadequate to his needs, and … at no time … was [he] really pressed by the want of money. But he thought that he was, and in his anxiety he turned to the theatre as a market in which to earn a fortune.” James did not disguise the commercial motive from himself. In late spring 1889, he mused to his notebook about the unexpected turn of events, with little sense that the new venture was to be a painful failure. “I had,” he admitted, “practically given up my old, valued, long cherished dream of doing something for the stage, for fame’s sake, and art’s, and fortune’s: overcome by the vulgarity, the brutality, the baseness of the condition of the English-speaking theatre today.” But now the prospect had been revived “on a new and very much humbler basis, and especially under the lash of necessity.” He decided not to limit his playwriting to a single experimental effort. His approach had a Napoleonic willfulness to it, as if his energies were unlimited, as if creative assertion were tantamount to victory. “I simply must try, and try seriously, to produce half a dozen—a dozen, five dozen—plays for the sake of my pocket, my material future.… The field is common, but it is wide and free—in a manner—and amusing.… Therefore my plan is to try with a settled resolution—that is, with a full resolution to return repeatedly to the charge, overriding, annihilating, despising the boundless discouragements, disgusts, ‘écoeurements.’ One should use such things—grind them to powder.”49

His approach was technical, his naïveté, immense. Having seen innumerable French farces and comedies, he did not see why he could not adapt or create one for the London popular stage. To attempt to write an intellectually and artistically sophisticated drama would be to insure small audiences and certain failure. He did not aspire to write plays that would be the dramatic equivalents of his fiction. Serious drama would earn him, he imagined, no more money than had serious fiction. He assured himself that theatrical success demanded mainly technical cleverness, literary craftsmanship, and a perceptive evaluation of what London and New York audiences required. If he kept at it, his technical abilities and his craftsmanship would be honed by experience. Success seemed likely. Though he would not always do it happily, he would, he decided, be totally accommodating. He knew, in theory, that writing for the popular stage was a collaborative effort, with scripts subject to constant revision under the pressures of rehearsal and performance. He did, though, from the beginning, underestimate how painfully galling such a process would be, how much he would resent not having full control of what he wrote. His preference was to provide as commercially viable a script as possible before the process of communal revision would begin. For the adaptation of The American, Compton would want a happy ending. Christopher Newman, in the stage version, must, James accepted, “get his wife.” The battles that he had fought with Howells and other editors for control over his plots, for the baseline of artistic realism, he readily avoided. “Oh, how [the play] must not be too good and how very bad it must be!”50

By spring 1890, he had finished adapting The American, which he at first called “The Californian,” into a four-act play, the second act of which he had sent to Compton three months before. “I have … written a big (and awfully good) four-act play,” he told Henrietta Reubell in April, “by which I hope to make my fortune.” He felt “ravished” by Alice’s unreservedly enthusiastic response to her reading of the script. Confined mostly to her sickbed, she embraced the opportunity of vicariously sharing her brother’s adventure. Your response, he told her, “makes me feel as if there had been a triumphant premiere and I had received overtures from every managerial quarter and had only to count my gold.” He had done, he felt, exactly what was required. “It is all ‘art’ and an absolute address of means to the end—the end, viz, of meeting exactly the immediate, actual, intense British conditions, both subjective and objective, and of acting in (to a minute …) two hours and three-quarters.” He felt an uneasy combination of intense nervousness and wild optimism. Fortunately, he had someone new to help him arrange and safeguard his gold, a young American businessman, playwright, and novelist, Wolcott Balestier. Recently come to London, Balestier had met James in late 1888, and had soon been employed to replace his agent Alexander Watt, perhaps because he had a special interest in the theatre. To the older man, Balestier seemed a paragon of intelligence and competence, the “perfection of an ‘agent.’”⁵¹ Balestier thought the play a likely success, a handsome beginning. So too did another new friend, Florence Bell, the sweetly supportive, intelligent wife of a wealthy Yorkshireman, a writer herself, who adored the theatre.

Most important, Compton liked it enough to begin rehearsals in early November 1890. From Italy, where James spent May through July, he kept one eye on the production plans, the other on the delights of a vacation sponsored by the hospitality of Baldwin in Florence and the Curtises in Venice. Italy was as “delightful … thank heaven, as ever. That trick is never played out—that magic always works, & as long as this is the case I think I shall never grow quite old.” The warmth, the color, the noise, were revivifying after a winter of London cold and influenza. He was delighted “to find that the taste for [Italy] doesn’t leave me in my old age—as some of the tastes of my youth have.” He found, though, that he had little taste for the Oberammergau festival, which he attended in June 1890 with the Curtises. The accommodations were uncomfortable, the hours early and long, the crowds immense, the rain incessant, the passion play itself” ‘sincere’ & tedious.” But he loved the Dolomites, “so much more empathetic than the Alps, & all the foreground a universe of glorious blue tumbling rivers & immensities of grass smothered in more kinds of lovely wild flowers than I knew existed upon earth. Above this rise the most splendid individual peaks, not in chains or clusters, but as if cold-shouldering each other (with their collars of snow) each on its own romantic hook.” What he loved even more was the beauty, the luxury, the sense of privacy and privilege of the Palazzo Barbaro, which he had to himself for thirty-six hours in July. “I arrived at 6 o’clk. with the intention of simply picking up my clothes & sleeping that night,” he told the Curtises. “But the next a.m. it was not in human nature to tear itself away! The day was delicious … & your marble halls suffused with the ‘tender’ note of your absence, were most pleasing & irresistible of all. I strutted about in them with a successful effort of self-deception & tasted for once of the fullness of earthly greatness.” Delaying his return to London, he engaged rooms on the cool heights of Vallombrosa, “more than 3000 feet in the air,” the furious heat beneath and behind him, “in the most exquisite beautiful spot I have ever seen in my life: mountains & woods & wonderful views—deep romantic shade—all hanging in the cool blue Italian air.”52

Even in Italy the excitement of the pending production of The American played a constant countermelody to his relaxation. In London, imagining that his presence was required at every rehearsal, he kept “dashing off into the country,” through November and December, to wherever the Compton group was performing, in preparation for the premiere in Southport, near Liverpool, in early January. The excitement of participating in rehearsals, the communal emotion, the alluring smell of “sawdust and paint,” helped him keep his bags packed, his energy flowing. He found himself “visiting all kinds of queer places & passing rheumatic hours on all sorts of draughty stages.” He went, with a sense of exhilaration, from the solitude of writing alone to the sociability of working with an acting company that he believed had to revolve around the author. But, ultimately, “it’s all for lucre—all for lucre—that gilds the dose.”⁵³ If successful, manager and playwright hoped for a London production in the fall.

While final rehearsals for The American continued, he wrote another play, “Mrs. Vibert,” later to be renamed Tenants. He had finished “(written in a month, working tooth & nail) another drama,” he confided to William, “of which I am tomorrow to read,” in London, “the 3d (& last) act to the interpreters,” two moderately well known actors “who have taken it in hand” in the expectation of a vehicle for themselves, with the encouragement of the actor-manager John Hare, whom James hoped would produce the play. “I have already read them the 1st & 2nd with high success—& the 3d, I know for I am extraordinarily wise about all these matters now—is calculated to please them best.” He thought it “pure movement, intensely interesting and suspense-producing.” The second act he had cut “as effectually and bloodily as the most barbarous dramatic butcher could desire; and have touched and amended the first. My III is, I think, absolutely producible tel quel—I learn so fast!” The reading, he was convinced, had been a “high success.… My auditors ‘rose at’ me, gave themselves away and were flushed and effusive.” He was not counting on The American alone. “I have still other dreams of ultimate lucre, & of a London production of the 2d piece before that of the American, which (unless it is unexpectedly brought to town,) is to be played in England, Scotland & Ireland before it is down, with a cast largely new, here.”54

By mid-December 1890, while the Parnell drama occupied the national stage, his own stage rehearsals were suspended until the dress rehearsals immediately before the premiere. He breathed more easily but still nervously. He had, he told Ariana Curtis, “polished off the pressing task.… I have done so, to a charm (the ‘charm’ is a manner of speaking,) & now I can take breath.” The “imperative … dramatic job” that had absorbed him had been the writing of “Mrs. Vibert”—“the composition at high pressure & with extreme rapidity of a new play (of which fortunately I had carried the subject & substance in my mind for years,) to meet a special contingency & ‘fit’ a couple of actors—to whom I have been reading it act by act, with all the success I could have wished.” It seemed almost certain that, unlike The American, it would be produced first in London, though when was still unclear. Having in mind that Compton would need another play with which to follow up the anticipated London success of The American, he devoted much of the second half of December to writing the first act of a third play, “a comedy in three acts,” probably an early version of a play later published as The Album. He wished to “finish the first [act] immediately,” he told Florence Bell. “I did so brilliantly, of course, yesterday.” His “of course” suggests some ironic self-deflation, but it released very little pressure from his nervously over-expanded theatrical aspirations. He tried, with limited success, to keep his optimism for The American within bounds. “I hope for a success & am presumptuous enough to almost believe in one, inasmuch as, battered, vulgarized, ‘cut,’ rendered only with humble zeal & without a ray of genius, the poor distracted play, when I see it rehearsed, appears to me to have, in spite of its misfortunes, inherent vitality—to hold up its head and make a fight.”55

At Southport for the dress rehearsals, he assessed the play’s chances as good, despite the inadequacy of the actors, except Compton himself. He rehearsed to Grace Norton his rationalizations for writing such plays at all. The bottom line was a bottom line: He was trying, in his “old age, & for the most mercenary reasons, to write successful plays,” having completed two, with a third partly done. He was going to assault repeatedly the citadel until the theatrical walls fell. And why shouldn’t they? His plays “are judged by the profession miracles of ‘technique!’” and to try “but once or twice is grotesque & trivial.” All his theatrical activity, he confided to his Cambridge friend, is ultimately “addressed to the U.S.—which is the dramatic Eldorado.… I may even have to go over, to teach my interpreters how to interpret.… God speed the sweet necessity.”⁵⁶ If London fell, then New York would also. He too would finally have his share of American gold.

( 7 )

Oscillating between moments of high confidence and hours of sheer terror, he nervously exhorted his friends and family to pray for him, to spend the evening in “fasting, silence & supplication.” “You must begin & pray for me hard,” he commanded Ariana Curtis, “about eight o’clock Saturday [January] the 3rd.” There could not be prayers enough. “After 11 o’clock to-night,” he told Gosse on the day of the performance, “I may be the world’s … & I may be the undertaker’s.… I am so nervous that I miswrite & misspell.” At the final rehearsal, he listened as if the words had been written by someone else. But the play still seemed to him to have “intrinsic vitality.” The five hours until the performance seemed like days. Too nervous to eat dinner, he went to the empty theatre hours early, and onto the stage where he straightened some of the small props and compulsively dusted the mantelpiece. “I am, at present,” he confided to William, as he waited, “in a state of abject, lonely fear.”⁵⁷

In the wings, during the first act, he hung onto the curtain rod, as if without such support his hollow knees would fall out from under him. As the curtain came down, he flung himself onto Compton. “‘In heaven’s name, is it going?’ ‘Going?—Rather! You can hear a pin drop!’” As he waited in his little cubbyhole behind the curtain in the right wing, he could literally hear the silence and the sound of success. The cavernous Southport theatre suddenly embodied the hushed breath of mutual blessing. The prayers he had asked for were being answered. Between acts, he dashed out to embrace every actor he had the time to put his arms around. It all seemed “magnificent.” Between the third and fourth acts, Balestier ran to the telegraph office and sent a glowing cable to The New York Times, “fifty vivid words” that they hoped would appear on every breakfast table in New York the next day. As the final curtain came down, he gave himself up to the “agreeable sounds” of appreciative applause. Compton had been brilliant. He would end, James assured his sister, by making his portrayal of Christopher Newman “a celebrated modern creation.”58 The play had been better than he had imagined it would be. He would make it better still.

With the whole company joining him behind the curtain, he heard a “big universal outbreak … for ‘author, author, AUTHOR!’” Taking him by the hand, Compton led him alone to the front of the stage for the first ovation of his life. He believed it was the first of many to come. In the highest spirits, he immediately telegraphed to Gosse—“COMPLETE AND DELIGHTFUL SUCCESS UNIVERSAL CONGRATULATION TO WHICH 1 VENTURE TO ADD YOURS AND YOUR WIFE’S”—and to Alice, who then cabled William—“UNQUALIFIED TRIUMPH MAGNIFICENT SUCCESS UNIVERSAL CONGRATULATIONS GREAT OCCASION FOR AUTHOR GREAT FUTURE FOR PLAY COMPTONS RADIANT AND HIS ACTING ADMIRABLE WRITING HENRY.”⁵⁹ With applause and congratulations settling sweetly into his ears, he had a celebratory dinner at the hotel with the Comptons, with Balestier and his wife, and with Balestier’s friend and partner, William Heinemann, all with glasses of champagne raised high to toast what seemed to him a wildly successful premiere.

But all in all, the performance had been at best a moderate success. William Archer, a young writer, translator, and drama critic—with an interest especially in Ibsen—and a central figure in the burgeoning effort to create a serious modern theatre in London, had a more realistic response. Eager to encourage James, whose fiction he highly respected, eager to discover an English Ibsen, Archer had written to James that he intended to attend the premiere, despite the distance from London. Normally, London theatre critics did not attend provincial performances. London papers, at best, reported the fact of a play in the provinces, sometimes with a quotation or two from local newspaper reviews. James felt anxious about and flattered by Archer’s attendance. “I’m afraid you won’t find me, to begin with, startlingly unconventional—my notion having been to get well in the saddle before I begin to tackle my horse.… Look out for prancing and curvetting later. But it’s very good of you to look out for anything.” Afterward, with the resounding applause of the audience in his ears, he happily responded to Archer’s request that he join him briefly at the hotel. “I think it’s a play,” Archer remarked, “that would be much more likely to have success in the provinces than in London.” He then began, Alice wrote in her diary, “as by divine mission, to enumerate all its defects and flaws.… To H, of course, heated from his triumph, these uncalled-for and depressing amenities from an entire stranger seemed highly grotesque, none the less so [that] the young man seemed by nature, divorced from all matters theatrical. In spite of the gloom cast over his spirits, H was able to receive it all with perfect urbanity.”60

Vistas of gold and triumph seemed to have opened before him. Compton reinforced his great expectations. A “large fortune” awaited both of them. For some time, Compton had yearned to become a London actor and theatrical manager, to have a London theatre of his own. He soon signed a contract to occupy the Opera Comique Theatre, with The American the first offering, scheduled for September 1891. In the meantime, he initiated his tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland, performing his repertory of half a dozen or so plays, of which The American was given its due once a week for a total of twenty-five performances. To James, the “complete and delightful” success of the play in Southport provoked the regret that he had made the commitment to have Compton take it on tour “all over the place” rather than go directly to London. But the compensation would be that Compton would grow even more into the part. He would also have the chance to make some improvements in the script. Mulling over the chances for a London success, he thought them excellent. If the play had done so well in the limitations of a Southport production, how much better it would do with the advantages of a London theatre and with more professional actresses, especially for the part of Claire de Cintré. “The attention—even the tension—of the [Southport] audience [had been] extremely sensible, the applause irrepressible, the final ‘ovation’ to the author,” he wrote to Ariana Curtis, “who had to come before the curtain, to simper & saulte, everything that notorious literary vanity could desire.” Balestier thought the evening had been a success, the most delightful feature of which was that James was now “like a runner ready to run a race. He has the air of one just setting out—a youngster with an oldster’s grip and mastery; surely the most enviable of situations.”⁶¹

While Compton traveled, James worked at his career. The London papers ignored the play, with the noticeable exception of a friendly, supportive mention by Archer in The World. Reviews from the provincial newspapers reached him in the next few months. Pleasantly responsive, their friendliness hardly counted. To James, their tone seemed low, common, not critically serious or even capable. “I have not seen a monosyllabic mention of the Great Fact in the London papers. They seem religiously, superstitiously, banded together to take no notice of what happens in the provinces—the provinces don’t exist for them. On the other hand every one seems to know about it.” He hoped for much. “Keep tight hold of everything,” he told the Comptons, “& we shall all go to glory.” When the play was being performed within reach of London, he often attended, sometimes with friends, sometimes to make changes in the script that the Comptons or he or both thought desirable. He insisted that he could show the actors how to do it better. In the middle of January 1891, he spent a day with the company “re-hearsing a ‘death-scene’ … to get it more right, & experimenting with a little new ‘business.’ Such are our daily duties.” Though he was determined to be an all-around theatre man, he could not have made himself popular with the actors. “I show ’em how to do it—& even then they don’t know!”62

The news of the Opera Comique lease thrilled him “from head to foot.” In London, he busied himself at promoting production possibilities for the two other plays he had written. His efforts were unsuccessful. He was disappointed that Compton did not like Mrs. Jasper enough to take it on. When he went to Paris in March 1891, he was at work on another play, whose third-act scenario he sent to Virginia Compton, who had wanted to play Mrs. Jasper. The act was “the most difficult [to write] of my long & chequered dramatic career, but I think it is, ‘technically,’ the best.” With John Hare and Mrs. Vibert, he started to learn the lesson of slow, gradual disappointment, even heartbreak, that began to plague his theatrical efforts. Hare had agreed, James thought, to act in and produce the play in the spring, then in the autumn or winter of 1891. “The only thing I do care to speak of now (and only to you),” he told William, “is … Mrs. Vibert, which John Hare is to produce at the Garrick.… But there are irrepressible delays, produced largely—indeed almost wholly—by the intense difficulties of casting. One tries to write as simple and feasible a thing as possible and still—with the ignoble poverty of the English stage—the people capable of beginning to attempt to do it are not findable. There’s a career for talent—to act my plays.” Whatever the real difficulties, Hare gave up on the play. James kept up his hope for more than two years that Hare or someone else would produce it. Without verbal wit or interesting characters, with a plot that in itself is a tired cliché and has the sad distinction of James avoiding every possibility to make it artistically interesting, the play was never produced.⁶³

Soon he was exerting himself to find the right female actress to play Claire in London. She materialized in Elizabeth Robins, a beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious twenty-five-year-old American, a former medical student at Vassar whose actor husband had committed suicide, supposedly because she had neglected him. She had come to London in 1888, where the publisher William Heinemann had fallen in love with her. As a champion of Ibsen and women’s rights, she was an intelligent actress with an agenda—to promote her own career and the modern theatre as embodied in Ibsen’s plays. When Hedda Gabler had an immense succès d’estime in spring 1891, James had less hesitation in praising Elizabeth Robins’ brilliant performance than he had in praising the play. She is “the most interesting English-speaking actress (or rather the only one,) that I have seen for many a day … an American of course.” Eager to have Robins for the role of Madame de Cintré, he cultivated her acquaintance. Flattered, she consented. Ibsen, though, puzzled him. He could find no models in English and American dramatic history for his plays. Structurally, formally, their idiosyncrasies irritated and distressed him. Later, he began to appreciate Ibsen’s genius.64

To a full house of friends, of literary and theatre personalities, drama critics, and an interested public, The American had its London premiere in September 1891. Sargent, Du Maurier, George Meredith, Rhoda Broughton, Constance Woolson, the young journalist Frank Harris, the novelist William Norris, the playwright Arthur Pinero, the producer and writer John Augustin Daly, all were in the audience. During the performance, James stayed outside, pacing up and down “the heartless Strand,” going through “an ordeal of flame—a hell of nervousness and suspense.” A modest semifailure, more a social than an artistic success, it was tolerated rather than liked, palatable to some, uninteresting to most. The English critics were gently unenthusiastic, mostly stressing the bald melodrama. The American reviewers were harsher about its melodrama and vulgarity. To many, the play seemed almost a degradation of the novel, which has many weaknesses but an essential integrity, whereas the play seemed all weaknesses without any integrity at all. James was deeply disappointed and stubbornly unrealistic. Perhaps, he thought, revisions could deal with the objections. He admitted that he was “in a rather abnormal state of tension & anxiety.… I am learning that the production of a play, in very stiff London conditions, is a complicated & agitating episode—attended with results impossible to foresee & only revealed by palpitating experience. The universal newspaper-press has been on the whole quite awful—& that introduces a potent ‘factor’ (as they say,) of discomfort. But the play, all the same, shows strong signs of life—though, as it’s only been a week, it is early to judge. The 1st night determines nothing.… This thing is now afloat—to sink or swim—& I think it will swim.” It was difficult, though, for “the poor struggling Stranded one” even to stay afloat.65 The play paddled in place, despite revisions that he believed improved it considerably, for only seventy performances, until December 1891.

The attendance, in late October 1891, of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, gave the play a brief resuscitation. Probably he had been induced to attend by James’s new friend, Mary Morton Sands, a stunningly beautiful American who moved at the highest levels of British aristocratic society. Her sister had become Edwin Godkin’s second wife in 1884. “I am ashamed to say,” Henry wrote to William, “that the P. of W. on Saturday last, gave it a lift by coming and manifesting an intense absorption. It is humiliating to be so beholden—but it isn’t all the Prince.” Whatever happened now, he wrote to William, he had at least had “an honourable run.” He was still not defeated. “Whatever shall happen, I am utterly launched in the drama, resolutely & deeply committed to it, & shall go at it tooth & nail. The American has distinctly done me good.” He was going to continue to “attack, renewedly & repeatedly the almost impregnable fortress of the theatre. But you must come,” he told Henrietta Reubell, “on the night the citadel is carried.” He was whistling in the dark with ferocious willfulness. “Honour is saved, but I grieve to say nothing else, for the piece made no money and I have not had a penny of royalties. (I tell this to no one.) On the other hand I am launched & committed, I have had success with the fastidious, and anything else I do will be greatly attended to. Moreover the production of a piece is an education—a technical one. I have had a revelation & I am enlightened.”⁶⁶ It was to take him three more years to work his way up out of the dark abyss.