THE NEW CENTURY
1900–1904
( 1 )
Staring into the mirror at Lamb House, he was impressed but startled by the newly clean-shaven face that stared back at him, a new face for a new century and for his fifty-eighth year. From one angle of vision he looked stolid, from another corpulent. He tried to adjust the mirror. “I should warn you,” he wrote to a friend, “I have cut off every hair of my beard & am a sight to behold—most uncanny & questionable.” If he looked, to himself, “uncanny,” it was the shock of repressed self-recognition, as if the unshaven child and youth he had been was now reborn as a man of late middle age. He had had “the beard & moustache,” he recalled, for “about 37 years,” since his twenty-first birthday. By shaving, he had wiped out something of the intervening years. It was an effort to be young again and to be someone he had never been. If, to the rest of the world, the difference was startling, it was the difference of a birth into modernity, the visible expression of putting the Victorian world behind him. With the dark beard gone, his full lips emerged, his gray-blue eyes sharper against his pink cheeks, the upper angles of his large face and forehead sloping brightly into his baldness. He gave the appearance of a man happily poised between sensuality and celibacy. Someone of comparatively nondescript looks seemed to have transformed himself into a distinguished handsomeness, a distinctive combination of “unction … gravity … [and] vehemence,” with “a theatrical look which struck the eye.” His manner, reflected in the mobility of his features, was “now restrained with a deep reserve, now suddenly expanding, so as to leave the auditor breathless, into a flood of exuberance.” His beard “had suddenly begun,” he had told William, “to come out quite white.” “It made me feel, as well as look so old.” He did not like looking the way he sometimes felt. “Now, I feel forty and clean and light.”1
During the first summer of the new century, he sat for his portrait to his young cousin, Bay Emmet. He was pleased but bemused by this first representation of his beardless self, “wholly another person from the old, of all the years.” The portrait seemed “rather strong & sound,” though, when he saw it completed, he thought he looked a little too much “the smooth and anxious clerical gentleman in the spotted necktie.” The portrait was less the issue than the feelings that the bland representation disguised. He hated the notion of coming “face to face, at my age, with every successive lost opportunity (wait till you’ve reached it!) and with the steady swift movement of the ebb of the great tide—the great tide of which one will never see the turn. The grey years gather, the arid spaces lengthen, damn them—or at any rate don’t shorten; what doesn’t come doesn’t, and what goes does.”2
His own transformation seemed less successful in the face of a visit in July 1900 from Charles Norton, sixteen years older than himself. He had not seen him for almost twenty years. “I found him utterly unchanged and remarkably young,” he wrote to Howells, the country scenes in whose latest novel made James “homesick for New England smells and sounds.… But I found myself, with him, Methusalesque and alien!” Norton’s visit brought back sharp memories of his childhood, nostalgia for his youth and for the country from which he had separated himself. “The dead awoke for me in his presence, & the silent spoke, & innumerable ghosts walked.” Why Norton seemed so “extraordinarily little altered or aged,” he could not fathom. “His speech, his ideas, his very terminology seemed to belong to some alien epoch of my youth—& I to have travelled thousands of miles from the order & air in which they had their home. It was an odd, quaint, really in fact strange, but not at all a tragic or awkward or unpleasant effect,” though it emphasized that for himself time had moved quickly.3 As urbane and kind as ever, Norton reminded James of his past. A benign variation of this theme preoccupied him in the short novel that he completed in summer 1900, The Sacred Fount, and in a new novel, The Sense of the Past, “an international tale of terror,” a few chapters of which he struggled with before giving it up in mid-August to concentrate on a longer but more manageable subject.
Politics had always been on his mind, despite his efforts to insulate himself, to muffle his anxiety when issues and conditions threatened his values, especially his sense of the importance of Anglo-American hegemony and of world peace. The British political scene that he had observed closely since the late 1870s seemed to him nasty, brutish, and clumsy, the apparently insoluble Irish Question and the decline of the empire compounded by the incompetence and corruption of a succession of governments. “The crudity of the struggle for place is … mainly what strikes one. It isn’t pretty.”4 The country seemed no better at the politics of empire than at the open-mindedness of art. Still, he had no doubt that Anglo-American culture deserved his allegiance, and there were no feasible, let alone attractive, alternatives. A deeply conservative liberal, he envisioned progress as the defeat of the dark forces within, as the triumph of the virtues that the society needed to practice as well as to articulate. The notion of war thoroughly nauseated him. He could think of nothing more wasteful, more brutal, more detestable, more personally soul shaking than people killing one another in an organized way.
The Irish Question, which undermined British-American relations, had become less threatening by the mid-1890s. He hoped that it would go away. Britain did not seem inclined to fight. When the Conservative government unexpectedly fell in summer 1895, it still seemed to him that the country was “becoming more rather than less anti-radical; & on the whole in a good sense.… Home-rule will not come to pass—& it looks as if it will perish in the most convenient way—by the internecine brawls of the Irish themselves.” The problem of Ireland could be left to the Irish to solve. In late 1896, President Grover Cleveland’s bellicose rejection of British claims in a boundary dispute involving British Guiana and Venezuela, which invigorated long-simmering American Anglophobia, startled and then frightened him. American jingoistic newspapers proclaimed the dominance of the Monroe Doctrine. “The absolute war-hunger as against this country—is a thing to darken one’s meditations,” he wrote to William, who shared his views. “It stupefies me—seems to me horribly inferior & vulgar—& I shall never go with it. I had rather my bones were ground into British powder! … It is too hateful.” For a moment it seemed as if his worst nightmare might be realized. He urged his American friends to keep calm and sane “in the midst of this ugly rumpus.… If only enough people will do it on both sides of the sea all will still be well.”5 Fortunately, the Anglo-American clash of interests and styles was soon reconciled.
For James, America’s claims had an unfortunate imperial resonance “such as no nation should dream of making without the army of Germany & the navy of England, rolled into one, to back it.” Though he took great interest in having a ringside seat at the demise of one empire, he had no desire to observe the rise of another. Suddenly there existed an American navy capable of international militancy, as the small republic into which he had been born changed radically by the century’s end. In spring 1898, after the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor and Admiral Dewey’s destruction of the Spanish fleet, America suddenly became an imperial power with a vehemence, a vulgarity, and a moral coarseness that shocked him, as it did William, who publicly opposed the Spanish-American War. “Your letter on Roosevelt & the Philippines,” Henry wrote to him, “commands all my admiration & sympathy. I agree with you no end—we have ceased to be, among the big nations, the one great thing that made up for our so many crudities & made us above all superior & unique—the only one with clean hands & no record of across-the-seas murder & theft.… One would like to be a Swiss or a Montenegrin now.” As the drums rolled and the flags waved, literature “goes more than ever to the wall.… I am all on the side, now, of the small countries. They are the only honest ones left.”6
Among his British friends, he “put up a brazen front” and to some extent justified the American attacks and the occupation of Cuba. To his fellow American, Henrietta Reubell, anxiously watching the events from Paris, he confided that though “the misrule, the cruelty of Spain is hideous … it’s none of our business.… Cuba will be an immeasurable curse to us. But I can’t talk of it—the frivolity & irresponsibility of Congress makes me too deadly sick.” He actually for a moment imagined the Spanish fleet bombarding Boston Harbor. Though geography made such an attack unrealistic, his anxiety was real. “I’m mainly glad,” he wrote to William, that “Harvard College isn’t—near Irving St—the thing nearest Boston Bay.” He had no doubt that the European powers would have gone to war more quickly than had America under the same provocation. “But I think it not good enough for us!”7 The American fall from moral superiority into imperial cruelty belied his idealization of his native country, which had its foundation in the moral idealism of the New England in which he had come of age and in the republicanism of the world into which he had been born.
The European scene seemed equally if not more frightening. “We live in a sorry world—& to me there are many nightmares,” he told Ariana Curtis in spring 1898. The Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, the complications of the Eastern Question, the Turkish presence in the Balkans, the tensions between France, Russia, Germany, and Britain in regard to spheres of influence, had provided strong reminders during the mostly peaceful years of Victoria’s long reign of the possibilities for European carnage. When, in autumn 1896, turmoil engulfed the Balkans, James deplored the European response, “the hideous cowardice & baseness of Europe in the face of the Turkish massacres.” Such potential for militant savagery and supine self-interest struck him with terror—“more disillusioning to me on the question of the ‘progress of the race’ than anything that has happened since I was born.” The European powers seemed incapable of either disinterested moral acts or enlightened self-interest. “England is only ashamed of herself—but it doesn’t go any further than that. It’s a magnificent chance for her to shame the others—but she is too dropsical & bloated to take it. I wish to the ‘most high God’ she & the U.S. wd. do something together. There wd. be something for the civilization of the future worth talking about.”8 But England did nothing except regard Queen Victoria’s grandson Kaiser Wilhelm with suspicion and protect its own interests.
Violence erupted when the Dutch colonists rebelled against British attempts to maintain dominance in South Africa. Suddenly, for the first time in James’s adult life, England was at war. For him, the only thing worse than Britain being at war was the possibility that the war might be lost. At Rye, in 1899, he saw the reserves being called out, the troop trains departing. As the autumn rushed on, bringing “exquisite, delicate effects of bared & rich-skied rural beauty,” his impatience and suspense deepened “over this nightmare of an ill-prepared war tent … sweeping off to Africa all the military resources, to almost the last man, that the country, the war-office, can muster. There is not a scrap of margin for anything else to happen! But probably nothing will—& the German Emperor & Empress arrive to-day on a visit to grandmamma.” In the New Year, he transformed his opposition to the war into support, unable to resist, despite his general pacifism, loyalty to the national spirit of the country that he had adopted as his home. “Now I am primitively, preposterously, profoundly at one—in feeling—with the community in which I more or less incongruously live. It’s impossible to be here & not be.”9 He had no doubt that the war was being badly misconducted. More than anything, he wanted it over.
The first winter of the new century was filled with gloom and anxiety. To his surprise, he had for a time the strange sense of reliving the emotions of the great war of his youth. “It brings me back across the years all sorts of far-away (& so unutterly, so dimly & direfully melancholy) echoes & memories—illusions almost—of our own war; of the general sense, the suspense & anxiety, stricken bereavement, woe & uncertainty, of that—& more still of the special sense of young men, sons & brothers of one’s friends, many magnificent, engorged in their flower. Such grey battalions of ghosts!” At Lamb House during the winter and spring of 1900, as the Boer War raged bitterly, he felt depressed and isolated. In town, the excited hubbub and social activity made him anxious. He could not decide which was worse. “As the days get longer, I bicycle again, & that helps me to live.” As the war gradually came to an end, British dominance was eerily punctuated by Victoria’s death in January 1901. From the crowded balcony of a wealthy American friend, George Vanderbilt, he watched the funeral procession from behind the high plumes and hats of the ladies in front of him. Kaiser Wilhelm, whom “we seem to have suddenly acquired [as] a sort of unsuspected cousin,” looked especially “wonderful and sturdy in the cortege.” Apparently the queen had died in his arms, with the Prince of Wales, now Edward VII, holding her hand. Kaiser Wilhelm “and the King are now more than ever close and intimate friends. May it make for peace!”10 He felt immense relief when the war essentially ended the next year.
But how nightmarish a place Europe was he saw with sharpest definition in the events in France that came to be called the Dreyfus affair. France’s internal ugliness became a nightmare that awakened all Europe in 1898. Émile Zola published a pamphlet denouncing the French authorities who had colluded with a high-ranking army officer to convict an innocent French army captain of Jewish background of passing military secrets to the Germans. French royalism, Catholicism, and anti-Semitism exploded into hostility against all those whose French blood was not “pure.” Abhorring fanaticism of any kind, anti-Semitism seemed to James even more abhorrent than other prejudices, partly because it had the potential to threaten, if not destroy, the European cultural comity. He immediately wrote a letter to Zola strongly expressing his admiration and support. Avidly devouring the newspaper, he was in imagination every morning in Paris “by the side of the big brave Zola.… I find [him] really a hero.” His “J’accuse” seemed “one of the most courageous things ever done & an immense honour to our too-puling corporation. But his compatriots—!” Among them was Bourget, whose anti-Semitic anti-Dreyfus sentiments James tactfully but unhesitatingly told him he strongly disapproved of. “The whole Paris business sickens & appalls me,” he wrote to Edward Warren in late February 1898, “& I worked off a part of my feeling yesterday by writing to Zola. He won’t, I think, however, go to prison. He will appeal, & there will be delays, & things will happen—elections … & other things. As it was, I think—I fully believe—his sentence, on Wednesday, saved his life. If he had got less, or attenuation, he wd. have been torn limb from limb by the howling mob in the street. That’s why I wrote to him.”
France seemed to have fallen from its republican ideals and aspirations into medieval prejudice and anti-Semitic bloodlust. “I sit in the garden and read L’Affaire Dreyfus. What a bottomless & sinister affaire & in what a strange mill it is grinding the poor dear French.… I eat and drink, I sleep and dream Dreyfus.” At the end of the year, he commented to Bourget on the difference between the French and the English represented by the respectful attendance of the Prince of Wales at Ferdinand Rothschild’s “severely simple Jewish obsequies.” James had valued the hospitality and friendship of numbers of Rothschilds, and met and respected many of the members of Anglo-Jewish society whose Jewishness he considered completely compatible with their high culture and position. “No one here,” he told Bourget, “grudges the Synagogue a single of its amusements—great as is the place which it and they occupy.” He lived, he felt, “in the great shadow of Dreyfus.… The wretched Alfred is, to one’s haunting imagination, condemned—a victim inexorably appointed; for even if he be acquitted … he will be assassinated the next moment.”11
By autumn 1899, a resolution seemed imminent, including the terrifying possibility of a military and royalist coup détat. “Half my time is spent in devouring the papers for their interest & the other half in hating them for the horrible way in which they envenimise all dangers & reverberate all lies.” The French army, he anticipated, “will presumably have its new Caesar-by-acclamation in the person of the younger of the 2 Bonaparte Princes.… I thank my stars that the military justice is not the regime it’s my fate to live under.” Eagerly soliciting Fullerton for whatever inside information or on-the-scene point of view he could provide, he bewailed “poor old fate-ridden France—so hideously condemned to be incomparably interesting. She can’t get out of it, ‘squirm’ as she will, & if she doesn’t take care she’ll be so again before 6 months, more than ever.” In 1899, he found himself an ambivalent guest at the spacious villa that the Bourgets had purchased at Hyères on the Riviera. They housed him in a separate small pavilion which he almost succeeded in burning down. The odd, symbolic conflagration at Hyères probably resulted from his smoking carelessly. “I set fire to my room-curtains … smoke & scufflings.… However, [the Bourgets] are a long story,” he wrote to Grace Norton. It all showed “in the lurid light of Dreyfus.” As he awaited the news from Paris, he felt smothered by “palpitations & anxiety.… The worst will have been known—or rather done: (& something tells me they will do the worst,) by the time this reaches you. And that way madness lies—!”12
( 2 )
No sooner had he moved into Lamb House in the summer of 1898 and arranged for the rental of De Vere Gardens than he decided that at long last he would visit Italy again. He had not been abroad for over five years. He felt the right combination of economic stability and restlessness. If he did not go now, he might never have another chance. He “wanted insurmountably, at last, to see … the loved Italy” again. At the beginning of 1899, he planned to leave no later than mid-February. But he came down with “an agonizing form of influenza,” with which he crawled into bed for ten days.13
In expectation of departing in the morning, he sat up very late in his Green Room study writing letters on Sunday night, the twenty-seventh of February, 1899. At two o’clock in the morning, he became aware of the smell of burning wood. Suddenly, he saw “smoke issuing from the crevices of the floor.” Immediately arousing Smith, together they “pried & chopped up some planks—near the fireplace—to find the place on fire underneath & behind the hearth.” Probably the chimney had been smoldering for weeks, perhaps months, “one of the lurking tricks & traps that old houses may play you, when … an old hearth (on re-arranging the rest of a whole chimney) has not been stirred on acct. of its pretty & pleasant last-century type.… Beneath it were infamous old floor beams … on which the hot stove sat—& which had not combusted before only by reason of generations of parsimonious firelessness. The whole place had got ignited.” Fortunately, the local fire brigade, which came immediately, was able to put out the fire with small damage to the house, hacking upward through the dining room wall. But they stayed till almost morning. Exhausted, he tumbled into bed around five o’clock. If he had gone to bed early, he consoled himself, the damage would have been much greater. If the fire had occurred just one day later, his servants, especially the heavy-drinking Smiths, might not have awakened in time to save themselves, let alone the house. “It was a great escape & a great warning—an escape above all through the blessing of my late vigil.… As it was, it was a scare & a mortal bore—but above all an admonition—& cheaply got.”14
Two days later, in response to an urgent telegram—“I AM NOW HELPLESS IN FACE OF RECONSTRUCTIONS … WILL BLESS YOU MIGHTILY IF YOU COME DEPARTURE OF COURSE PUT OFF”—Edward Warren, with his usual generosity, had taken the reconstruction in hand. Within days, James felt in good spirits. “It is all,” he told Gosse, “to be made again better & saner & safer than it ever was!” He happily postponed his departure. The attractions of Lamb House appealed to his desire for sedentary domesticity. He feared the drain of traveling and visiting. “Abroad it’s all a battle,” he complained, “from the waylaying Emmets in Paris, and the waylaying Bourgets at Costebelle,” the latter a visit “promised year after year these 4 or 5 last & never yet performed.” But he still hoped to be in Venice by the end of March. He made his unnecessary excuses to Warren. “I must at last depart—there’s a very serious obligation on me, long shirked, in Rome, & it’s getting late.”15
The middle two weeks of March 1899 he spent in Paris, often entertaining two of his young Emmet cousins. Paris seemed its usual sybaritically pagan self, especially highlighted by the extravaganza of the Great Exhibition, which struck him “as a monstrous massive flower of national decadence, the biggest temple ever built to material joys & the lust of the eyes.… It’s a strange great phenomenon—with a deal of beauty still in its great expensive symmetries and perfections—& such a beauty of light.” The city, though, seemed empty of familiar faces. “My old circle here has faded away into the twilight.” Toward the end of the month, he went southward to Hyères, where he spent sixteen days with the “profusely kind and considerate” Bourgets at their palatial twenty-five-acre estate whose vastness made Lamb House seem minuscular, though the local villas themselves he thought tasteless. The landscape, however, was superb. “It is so long since I had seen the foreign & the Southern that it all rather rolls over me here like a wave—the harmony & loveliness & nobleness of this wondrous French riviera, the light, the grace & style & general composition.” At Costebelle, he acted the good guest, except for setting fire to his pavilion curtains. The acrid air of France’s Dreyfus madness made him homesick for what seemed to him English moral sanity.16
In Genoa, he worried about how he might protect his privacy for the next weeks. There were visits that had to be made, including a day trip to Bogliasco, where he had tea with the Ranee, and then dinner with her next day, during which her ex-lover, Morton Fullerton, was doubtless a topic of conversation. He had found waiting for him in Genoa a note from a Mrs. Edith Wharton—a friend of the Bourgets and an aspiring young American writer whose name he had heard a number of times from mutual acquaintances—“announcing to me that she is sending me a fruit of her literary toil and that she further expects to be at ‘Claridge’s’—London—the sojourn of kings—in May.” Francis Marion Crawford beckoned from a villa at Sorrento he had built with the huge proceeds from his novels. James had promised the Swedish psychiatrist Axel Munthe that he would visit him at Capri. Mrs. Humphry Ward expected him to stay at the villa she and her husband had taken at Castel Gandolfo in the Alban Hills near Lake Nemi, a short distance from Rome. Most of all, he wanted to see Venice again and to visit Fenimore’s grave in Rome. He had also promised Story’s children that he would discuss with them their desire that he write a biography of their father. The schedule seemed threateningly heavy. “It’s really to escape them all,” particularly the social obligations of Rome, “that I am cultivating the cunning of the Choctaw & if need be the rudeness of the Apache. Five years ago they were the ruination of Italy to me, & the reason why I have suffered these 5 years of privation to roll by.”17 But he could hardly delude himself into even hoping that he would be able to work.
He was happy to be in Italy again. The mild, chattering Genoese ambiance came into his hotel room “with such sunny warmth of Italian air and shuffle of Italian feet and revival of Italian memories … the little old throbs and thrills of the great old superstition.” He stayed for three weeks in Venice at the Palazzo Barbaro with the Curtises. They indulged his fantasy of sleeping in the vast library “upstairs, for the rare romance of it, & the looking out, of my famished eyes, on the Canal Grand. I should be in a sort of splendid ‘isolation’ up there, ‘mornings,’ working.” Surrounded by white mosquito netting, he slept in royal dignity and virginal seclusion in a bed set up for him in the center of the eloquent room. Visiting the decrepit Katherine Bronson for three days at Asolo, he was distressed at her semi-imprisonment by her two nurses and her houseful of exploitative servants. She was, though, better than he had “feared to find her—but with a good deal of rheumatism, an enormous appetite … the strangest mixture of folly of purchase & discomfort about necessaries.… It’s the queerest saddest situation.” Evenings at Asolo he spent mostly with the philandering Pen Browning, whom he had met accidentally at the railroad station in Venice and who proudly showed the owner of minuscular Lamb House “all his wondrous property including the boa-constrictor, the new mountain,” and his villa.18
Fortunately, Rome, in early May 1899, did not prove as socially demanding as he had feared, though he spent more hours than he wanted with the Storys’ son Waldo, also a sculptor. James was unable to reject his insistent plea that James write a biography of his father. The money attracted James, and he found himself disarmed by the inherent understanding that he would do it at a time of his own choosing. Despite the modern desecrations, Rome itself seemed quietly attractive, his days “singularly prosperous & pleasant.” One of the unexpected pleasures of Rome was in his meeting a young Norwegian-born American sculptor, Hendrik Andersen, whom he found as alluringly attractive as his work. In a side trip from Rome, he visited for almost a week the Humphry Wards, who had taken a “vast, rambling, bare, shabby & uncomfortable” apartment in a villa near Lake Nemi in order for Mary Ward to work up the background for a novel set in Italy. The tactful, good-natured visitor did not comment on what seemed to him a ludicrous fictional strategy. Instead, he enjoyed the beautiful vistas, the stunning views of lake and campagna, “with Rocca d’Papa & Monte Cavo perched opposite,” the delightful walks, despite the cool weather and the rain, “in our garden, among ilexes & old statues, wondrous perspectives & cedarn alleys, the huge ruins & porticoes of a villa of Domitian.”19 It was Italy at its most romantically picturesque.
So too were Sorrento and Capri. Toward the middle of June 1899, as he was about to leave Rome for Florence, the persistent Crawford sent “his mother-in-law & his daughter, to bodily snatch me hence.… I struggled—but I have succumbed.” As usual, “people, peoples, alas, are in spite of every precaution the eternal enemy.” The popular novelist’s luxurious villa raised his envy, made him irritable, provoked his impatience to get away—“Crawford … a prodigy of talent & of wealth. He is humiliating,” he told William. From a lifetime spent writing detestable potboilers, Crawford had become rich. From a lifetime of dedication to his own art, James could hardly afford to stay abroad any longer, though he managed successfully to restrain his anger and resentment. At the Protestant Cemetery, “the sweetest spot on earth,” he visited Fenimore’s grave. The simple plaque and the high deep green cypresses were as much a memorial as the monumental statue a few yards away that Story had created to commemorate his wife’s grave site. “It represents the angel of Grief,” James was to quote from one of Story’s letters in the biography he was not to write and publish until 1903, “in utter abandonment, throwing herself with drooping wings and hidden face over a funeral altar. It represents what I feel.”20
James’s own feelings were, for the time being, unarticulated, except that he had to visit Florence and that he wanted one last week in Venice, which he feared he would have to forgo, the heat already having become oppressive. His week in and around Florence in late June was, though, “tolerably torrid,” his time with Florentine acquaintances, including Munthe, whom he had already visited at Capri, pleasurable. Homesick and eager to return to Lamb House, to his delight he still found that he could manage almost two final weeks in Venice. At the beginning of July, crossing the Alps, traveling “in tunnels & perspirations,” he rested briefly in Paris, “yearning rather intensely, after so very many weeks, to return & repossess” Lamb House. “Italy has been again a thoroughly delightful experience, but my capacity for the wastefulness … of travel shrinks year by year, & after a few weeks I long again for my small regularities & privacies.” By the second week of July 1899, the “weary homeward pilgrim” had returned to Lamb House, “all impatient to reenter the modest hermitage he left nearly 4 months ago & which he really hopes never again to quit for scenes so expensively alien.”21
Happy as he was to be home, he brought with him a heavy burden of anxiety. In early June 1899, he had felt “agitated to the depths” at the news that William had a serious cardiac illness, ascribed to the strain that he had put on his heart during a difficult climb in the Adirondacks in summer 1898. A year later, William realized that it was more than a temporary muscular condition. An undisciplined workaholic, under heavy pressure to earn money to support his family, William labored at constant lecturing in addition to his Harvard responsibilities. He wanted to give up his endless round of well-paying but exhausting lectures at disparate colleges and universities even as distant as California—invitations for which came in at the rate of almost one a day—and his wildly applauded performances on the Chautauqua circuit. He wanted entirely to retire from teaching, which he disliked, as soon as possible. Constantly on edge, he lived with the tension of a restless, anxious personality and with the pressures of insistent self-exhortation. Experiments with his own health included visits to psychics. William “deals in ghosts,” Henry amiably remarked to a childhood friend, “but is blessedly not one.” More questionably, he prescribed medicines for himself. At the end of each school semester, he applied self-administered electric shocks to stimulate his nervous system. Most of all, he hiked and climbed for stimulation and narcotic exhaustion as frequently as he could get away to the mountains. “There was,” a friend remarked, “in spite of his playfulness, a deep sadness about [William] James. You felt that he had just stepped out of this sadness in order to meet you, and was to go back into it the moment you left him.”22
Europe beckoned; he had accepted in 1896 an invitation from the University of Edinburgh to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures. This was a startlingly remunerative honor, “the ridiculous figure,” William wrote to his brother, “of ‘about 700£’ for … 10 lectures … or $350 per lecture. I never knew before how much my time was worth an hour!” From England, Henry expressed his elation at the success of William’s 1896 Lowell Lectures, though he confessed he felt the pang of his own “disinheritedness,” his distance from the American scene and his American family. “You, William, don’t even allude to the possibility of your coming out for your Edinburgh degree.… If you see your way to it it will be a sight to behold you.”23 The commitment to give the lectures at some unspecified date in the near future did not make Europe as imminent as the hope, in early 1899, that a European cure would work once again. William thought he might find relief from frequent heart palpitations, shortness of breath, and sharp chest pains at a traditional European spa like Nauheim, where medical experts provided variations on the water cure. He hoped to repeat what he and Henry had experienced as young men: the European cure in which the James family had so deeply believed.
From Rome, in spring 1899, Henry assured William and himself that it was only a question “of care & taking account.” The De Vere Gardens apartment, which would be empty beginning in July, and the infinitely restful Lamb House, would be perfect for that. He and his wife Alice would be welcome guests whenever they were not at Nauheim, De Vere Gardens “yearning for you & aching for you. You’ve only to consider it a convenient, commodious, excellent resting-place & refuge for the interval before Edinburgh & … for all intervals after.” William immediately provided reassurances. This heart condition “doesn’t menace either longevity or life—it only checks me in too-rapid mountain climbing.” Such reassurances were not convincing. “I think of you day & night,” Henry wrote to him at Nauheim, to which he and Alice had gone directly, sailing from New York in July 1899. William optimistically expected, Henry reported to Grace Norton, an “apparently guaranteed” cure, though with “imperative periodical return.” He himself suspected that William’s heart condition must “make a marked difference in all his adjustments of life,” though “I must see him before I know.” When he did see William in October 1899, for the first time in seven years, he was hardly reassured. The London specialist whom William now saw regularly “takes a very interested & hopeful view of him.” But it was clear that the Nauheim regime and doctors had been an utter failure. Dr. Baldwin had come up from Italy to see William at Nauheim; he had unhesitantly told him that his life was in danger. Henry’s own healthy heart more than shrank, his life suddenly in turmoil. “I always regarded him as the pillar of my family-life (so far as I have—or have had—one), & to see him down while I am up bewilders & disorients me. But speriamo [“let us hope”].”24
Hope did not come easily, but Henry’s resilience, stubbornness, and will to be cheerful and productive, had enough force to sustain him through this crisis. Despite the turmoil, Henry found himself both counting his blessings and continuing with his work. One of the blessings was William’s wife, whom Henry now came to adore as an embodiment of female beneficence and loyalty almost equal to that of his own mother. Another was William’s twelve-year-old daughter, Peggy, enrolled in a London school, and now, with her parents and by herself, a frequent visitor at Lamb House. “As she grows older, [she] may be the consolation of my declining years. But she will have to hurry!” Eagerly, solicitously, he hovered over his brother during October 1899 at Lamb House. He could do and think of nothing else.25 When William went up to London for the last two months of the year, Henry breathed a sigh of relief, both because William’s health seemed stable for the moment and because he had his privacy again. Lamb House was blessedly, tremulously quiet for the last months of the old century.
It was also now completely his in another sense. In late July 1899, he had been offered its outright ownership. “Arthur Bellingham, my landlord, has suddenly died, in S. Africa,” he wrote to William at Nauheim, “& his widow inheriting this house has, without delay—from S. Africa, where she is & belongs—offered to sell it to me.” He was ecstatic. At last he could have a property of his own. Concerned about the money, he readily allayed his anxiety with the notion of borrowing a portion of it from the British firm he had banked with since 1872. If he were to obtain a tenant for De Vere Gardens for the new year, he would need to borrow only a small amount. When he expressed to William his “tears of joy at the thought of acquiring this blessed little house so promptly & so cheaply” and confidingly, fraternally, asked his opinion, William, to his shock, responded with irritable words of caution and conveyed Baldwin’s judgment that the house could not possibly be worth the two thousand pounds Bellingham’s widow was asking. Why did Henry need to own a house at all? Wasn’t the expense an unwarranted risk? Furious, Henry angrily told William that that aspect of it was none of his business, that he expected William’s support in his pursuing something that his “whole being cries out aloud for,” and that he had assurances based on knowledge far superior to Baldwin’s that the purchase price was not only reasonable but cheap. At fifty-six years of age, with a long life of work and accomplishment behind him, was it too much to ask that he be allowed to curl up “in a poor little $10,000 shelter” when the Crawfords, Bourgets, Wards, and Howellses of this world live in splendid villas? It was enough to make him feel “the bitterness of humiliation.”26
What he had wanted was William’s loving support. Miserably unhappy at Nauheim, William had little sympathetic energy to spare. Henry stood firm against his older brother’s criticism, after a brief moment of self-doubt, with reason, facts, and a passionate statement of his own deep desire to have the house. Everything, he believed, validated his position. “I am not yet wholly senile,” he told William. He then laid out a convincing brief for the value of the purchase. “The house was bought some 15 years ago for £1200 … just before Rye had begun to be a great golfing-place.… Since that time everything has gone up.… A few years after buying the house my late landlord bought the studio which abuts on the garden & more or less commands it. This is a little old Wesleyan chapel.… I don’t know how much more he paid for it.…I assure you that no one here thinks the proposal excessive.” Guided by his wife, William had already relented and partly apologized. Henry declined his brother’s repentant, and his sister-in-law’s eager, offer to lend him whatever additional money he needed. He now saw that he would not have to borrow a penny to make the purchase. “I have no payments whatever to make till February 3rd 1900, & then only of a sum of money which I have already & have had for some time … besides another balance at the Rye bank, & which, 6 months hence, will be but a fraction of my cash funds.” The eight hundred pounds he had with his banker were “the only purchase payment” he would have to make. “The other £1200 are in a mortgage on the house at 4 percent, in most respectable hands here, & which is eminently content to remain, as I shall let it. I can easily … pay it off in a year.” When he rented the De Vere Gardens flat to the Stopford Brookses, he found that the rent amounted to almost half the purchase money of the house. Kipling wrote from his own recent purchase, The Elms, at Rottingdean, near Brighton, to congratulate him. “Lawful matrimony (in real estate) is ever the most honourable.… She will be expensive but at least she won’t rebuke you for extravagance incurred on her account.” His nerves calmed, amity between the brothers reestablished, by the middle of August 1899 he had bought Lamb House. When William arrived in October to see the house for the first time, “the whole,” for Henry, was “infinitely settled & sweet.”27
William’s health was not. For two difficult years, he oscillated between Rye, Nauheim, southern France, and Italy in occasionally sensible, sometimes frenetic efforts to find the right doctor, the right medicine, the right climate. In late January 1900, having again postponed the Edinburgh lectures, he went to southern France to stay at a villa near Hyères that had been lent to him. “Thankful for small mercies,” Henry accompanied brother and sister-in-law as far as Dover, slightly uplifted by what seemed a small improvement in William’s health in the weeks before departure. He believed the improvement was a result of his having created at Lamb House “an atmosphere of optimism & an illusion of ease.” William “is my only thought & almost my only news,” he wrote to America. In Paris, William later confessed, he “made an ass” of himself, “letting that spider of hell the ‘healer’ touch me.… Altogether it has been a nasty job, and I shall never dabble in their like again.” From southern France, Henry heard that “the air & sun & change are already immensely sustaining him.” Eager to be hopeful, in early February he passed on to a friend the report that William was, “thank heaven, already definitely better for climate & out-of-door life.” Later the same day, he received dismally pessimistic news from William. He wrote back that “my heart is heavy with your mention of your ten poor days.” He was certain that his brother would never be himself again.28
William, soon back at Nauheim, had a nervous collapse in the spring, with “fever and bleeding.” Unexpectedly, a heart specialist in Geneva opined that, despite his worsening symptoms, he was actually getting better. In May, Henry, in London, had met Mark Twain, who had just returned from Sweden, looking “rosy as a baby,” and who reported, Henry thought, that Lord Kelvin had said that “it was all ‘Albumen’ and he was putting W. on it, I didn’t know Lord Kelvin was a ‘Doctor’ and don’t understand ‘why Sweden?’” He had misheard the entire comment, including the names, which had had nothing to do with William. While Alice and Peggy stayed at Lamb House for six weeks in the summer of 1990, Baldwin joined William at Nauheim in the dual role of doctor and patient. “Poor Baldwin—poor Baldwin! I can’t say more,” Henry wailed, “it’s all so wild & mixed.”29
In the summer at Nauheim, and in the fall and winter of 1900-1901 in Rome, under the supervision of Baldwin, himself ill with a series of manic episodes and nervous breakdowns, William had a treatment of “Robert-Hawley animal extract” injections, Baldwin’s “famous remedy,” which filled the patient with hope. “The statistics are marvellous in all kinds of degenerative troubles, and there is no bad result.… If it were only possible to have begun 3 weeks ago, I dare say I should greet you,” he told Henry, “an unrecognizable youth.” Frightened, irritable, always willing to experiment, William tried whatever came to hand. When Alice left Rye in September 1900 to join her husband, Henry was “alone for almost the first time” in what seemed years. But, though his “existence for a good many months, has been, in all ways, rather a deluge of family history,” he had “sat firm here, letting the waves break & managing to accomplish, in spite of them, some of the essentials of work.”30 It had been an extraordinary year for both brothers. Despite living the life of an invalid in Nauheim and in Rome, with baths, injections, and electric treatments, William managed to write his Gifford Lectures for Edinburgh. Despite incessant guests and perturbing worries, Henry managed to conceive and write an extensive outline for a new novel, The Ambassadors.
From Rome, at the beginning of 1901, while Henry worked on his new novel, William kept him informed of his progress. Changes were more an expression of his moods than of his physical condition. Ever the medical and pyschological optimist, he assured him that, despite his exhaustion, the treatment was going well. Henry rejoiced at the “comfortable beginning of Baldwin’s injections.… It makes all the difference in the world in my feelings about your ‘exile’ that it is subject to his ministrations. May his reason be spared him at least to see you through!” As he worked on the Gifford Lectures, which examined varieties of religious experience and whose case histories resonated with the emotional eccentricities of Henry senior, William confided his worst fears only to his notebook. “I find myself in a cold, pinched, quaking state when I think on the probability of dying soon with all my music in me. My eyes are dry and hollow, my facial muscles won’t contract, my throat quivers, my heart flutters, my breast and body feel stale and caked.” At the same time, Henry assiduously worked at The Ambassadors, his own confrontation with loss and with the fear of death. He felt, at the middle of March 1901, “very intensely and inexorably” bound to his “belated book.”31
At Easter 1901, William and Alice came to England to stay at Lamb House, and then to travel at last to Edinburgh for the Gifford Lectures. Greeted at Edinburgh as an intellectual hero, William basked in the publicity and the adulation. The lectures were a smashing success. He felt, at long last, liberated. His health seemed immediately better. Having resigned his professorship at Harvard, he hoped to have the opportunity to write two or three more books. If William took care of his health, Henry believed, that would be possible. In late summer 1901, William’s wife returned to America. In early July, Henry finished The Ambassadors and began The Wings of the Dove, the idea for which had been on his mind for eight years. At home at Cambridge, William immediately resumed the animal extract injections, which he credited with working miracles. “I am going on splendidly,” he wrote to his brother, and have “days with feelings just like my old ones of pride and power and adaptation to the world’s demands.” At Lamb House, Henry felt both relieved and lonely. He missed his brother and sister-in-law, and his niece, who had spent much of the summer with him “in idyllic intimacy and tranquillity.” They were all gone. He had a poignant sense “of the beautiful vanished days.”32
( 3 )
When James had left Rome in June 1899, the most precious possession that he carried away was a small bust that he had purchased, “out of the frenzy of my poverty,” from the twenty-seven-year-old Norwegian-born American sculptor from Newport, Hendrik Andersen. A child of immigrant poverty and of an alcoholic, unreliable father, Andersen worshiped his hardworking mother, the financial and emotional center of the family. “No matter how old I get or how far advanced I become,” he had pledged to his mother on his twenty-first birthday, “my mother will always be the first in my remembrance.” After his mother, his closest relationship was with his brother Andreas, a struggling painter. Following four years of study in Boston and Paris, and sponsored by wealthy Bostonian patrons, Hendrik Andersen, in 1897, had settled in Rome. With a strong sense of vague religiosity, originating in his parents’ Lutheran piety, he cast his artistic ambitions in terms of a religious, God-ordained mission. Both naively idealistic and ingenuously self-promoting, the strikingly good-looking Andersen had been taken up by Lord Ronald Gower, who promoted him and his work. In 1897, in Rome, they were constant companions. When Lord Ronald returned to England, Andersen “missed him very much indeed.” In London, in the spring of 1897, on his way to America for a visit, Andersen stayed with the poet Arthur Symons, who had posed for him in Rome and with whom he had become warmly friendly. Gower lavishly entertained him at the Royal Society and at his comfortable home “full of valuable and beautiful works.” The homosexual Lord Ronald had had both realized affairs, including one with Morton Fullerton, and warm friendships of the sort he now had with the innocent, emotionally engaged young sculptor. “I have met many of his friends and am invited everywhere to dine and lunch,” Andersen boasted to his family in Newport. He visited Sargent, Burne-Jones, and Watt at their studios. In Rome, Saint-Gaudens came to his studio, “and said very nice things.”33
Slim, fair, boyishly beautiful, the handsome young man immediately attracted James’s attention and support. The moment James climbed the stairs into Andersen’s sun-filled studio in Rome he began a memorable relationship that was to clutch at his heart for the next five years. Inviting Andersen to lunch, he extended their companionship through dinner. Though he had never felt that he could afford to be a patron of the arts, before leaving Rome he insisted on purchasing, for fifty pounds, Andersen’s portrait bust of a young boy, Count Alberto Bevilacqua, which looked somewhat like Andersen himself. A few weeks before, at Castel Gandolfo, staying with the Wards, James had been fascinated by “a beautiful youth” who, for a few coins, guided them through the ruins of the Temple of Diana on the shore of the lake. In the golden early evening, in a scene that became fixed in Mary Ward’s memory, this “young Hermes,” whose name was Aristodemo, seemed to absorb all James’s attention. “‘Aristodemo!’ he murmured, smiling, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing the word. ‘What a name! What a place!’”34 Perhaps the bust of Bevilacqua reminded him of emotions associated with this and similar experiences, but, whatever its evocative powers, it was the one work by Andersen that James ever genuinely liked, mostly because of its emotional association with their first meeting. Obsessed with gigantic nude figures and with what James soon thought of as overly blunt, megalomaniacal, and commercially impractical statues, Andersen had an immense, Michelangelesque ambition. At first, it seemed to James idealistically, engagingly benign, a young man’s temporary impracticality. Later, he saw it as his friend’s fatal flaw as an artist.
Within two weeks of his return from Italy in July 1899, “the beautiful bust” had arrived at Lamb House, where he placed it in a position of prominence on the corner mantelpiece in the dining room. “I shall have him constantly before me, as a loved companion and friend. He is so living, so human so sympathetic and sociable and curious, that I foresee it will be a lifelong attachment.” The fifty-pound bank draft was immediately on its way to Rome. “Little Bevilacqua … is meanwhile, dearer and dearer.” He soon had, he told his distant friend, “struck up a tremendous intimacy with dear little Conte Alberto, and we literally can’t live without each other. He is the first object that greets my eyes in the morning, and the last at night.”35 Andersen’s work stood in for Andersen himself, the part for the whole, a combination of phallic synecdoche and marital displacement. It was to be, mostly, an epistolary relationship. James assumed that that was the way, for him, such relationships had to be, though if Andersen had been willing to accept his invitations to visit more frequently in England and even to stay indefinitely at Lamb House, the relationship might have taken on some of the domesticity for which James occasionally longed. Andersen’s passion mostly went into his obsession with his gigantic statues and his preoccupation with his mother.
Some of his passion, in a quiet way, came to James. Soon after the delivery of Bevilacqua, the sculptor himself, on his way to America in summer 1899, arrived at Lamb House to stay briefly with James “who is kindness itself and whom I care very much for.… He has such a pretty little red brick cottage, very old but beautifully arranged.… I have one of the most beautiful rooms I ever slept in, with rich old oak walls in panels polished so that they look like strong iron and in every way I am in a little paradise here.” During the all-too-brief visit, they took long walks and bicycle rides together. James expected to renovate his small Watchbell Street studio so that Andersen would be able to work there when he returned. “We shall be good for each other; and the studio good for both of us.” At the railroad station, he felt “absurdly sorry to lose” his young friend. “I have missed you out of all proportion to the three meagre little days … we had together.” Probably he had sent him off with whatever introductions he thought might be helpful, including one to Isabella Gardner. In New York, preoccupied with his family and his mostly unsuccessful efforts to get commissions, Andersen began work on a statue of Lincoln, for which he had great hopes. His father’s alcoholism and his mother’s martyrdom weighed heavily on him, his refuge a disembodied aesthetic idealism in which the nobleness of art substituted for ordinary feeling. “Keep to high ideals and work them out day and night,” he told his youngest brother. “Get above every sentimental passion, and far above every physical passion!—and aim to make the mind noble.” At Lamb House, James suffered through William’s difficult visit and kept assiduously at work. Jonathan Sturges visited. Morton Fullerton was much on his mind. From Boston, Andersen reported on his progress, to which James responded with supportive, optimistic exhortations. “Gird your strong loins, nurse your brave visions, bear with your stupid sitters, gouge in your master-thumb.… I continue to have long talks with little Bevilacqua about you, and we help each other to bear up.”36
From Lamb House, James kept his eye on Andersen’s frustrations in New York and Boston. “I gather that your installation and start in New York are a grimishly uphill matter and I think of you with infinite sympathy and understanding.” He urged Andersen to do what was necessary to find patrons. “I don’t, I can’t for the life of me see how such extraordinarily individual and distinguished portrait busts as you have the secret of shouldn’t be ferociously wanted as soon as people have begun to become aware of them. Make them aware, and then wait. You won’t have to wait too long.” Unfortunately, it soon became clear that Andersen could not earn a living in America. “I think of you,” James wrote to him, “with hope in the big, kind, ugly country—so monstrous and yet so responsive—with hope and with confidence, as well as with compassion.”37 Probably while Hendrik was in New York, his brother Andreas painted a portrait of the two Andersen brothers. Unfortunately, James never saw the double portrait. In Andreas’ homoerotic painting, Hendrik, nude, slender, blond, with deep red lips, reclines in bed, partly covered with a sheet that rises noticeably over his genitals. With his right hand he strokes a white and black cat. Andreas, dark haired, also nude, equally handsome, sits at the edge of the bed, beginning to dress himself.
When Hendrik sailed for Rome via England late the next autumn, James rejoiced at the opportunity of Andersen being with him again in Rye. It was “news of joy.… It will be delightful to see you and I shall pat you lustily on the back.” The best guest room in the house awaited him. “I keep your place for you hard—or rather soft.” On December 1, 1900, Andersen was “safe and sound with dear Henry James,” he wrote to his “own loving mama.… I am very fond of him and we get on beautifully together. He is very sensitive and has such a good heart.… He works so hard, and when I look at his fine strong head, I can see how much bigger and greater he is than his works.” The face had recently been shaved—partly to look younger, perhaps with Andersen’s visit in mind—a change for which James had prepared him with a “poor little kodak-thing of my brother and me” that he had sent to Andersen in New York. “He is thin and changed and I am fat and shaved.” Just as James began to look at Hendrik’s statues, or at least photographs of them, with some dismay, Andersen looked at James himself with more pleasure than he read James’s fiction. “I never feel the flesh and blood in any of his characters,” he confided four years later to his sister-in-law. “To me they are sexless, glimmering, with a complete commonplace of intellectual social etiquette,” without “vital force.”38 Andersen’s criticism loosely echoed James’s comments over the years on Andersen’s statues. The sexuality in James’s fiction seemed beyond Andersen’s perception. Andersen’s nude, immense, essentially faceless statues seemed to James impotent, anti-erotic posturing. The friendship was based on something other than an appreciation of one another’s works. On James’s part, there was, for a brief time, a strongly articulated love for a young man whose beauty and youth seemed breathtaking.
Andersen, though, mostly stayed away. In Rome, he allowed himself to believe that he was creating masterpieces, whatever the opinion of patrons and fellow artists. James felt himself essentially committed to England and work. He wrote his much-missed friend long, comforting, exhortative, occasionally avuncular letters, some of them with extravagant expressions of love and the frequent imagery of physical embrace that had begun now to be his characteristic eroticism, as if a kiss and a hug represented as full an expression of love as any other physical act. “I feel, my dear boy, my arm around you. I feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of your excellent future and your admirable endowment.” To Andersen’s frustrations and depressions he ministered with the wisdom learned from his own experience. “The only thing that makes life tolerable [is] to forget everything in some sort of creation. That’s what you can do—none better. It’s probably what you are, doing. Dio vuole!”
For the next two years, James regularly wrote long, amorous letters to Andersen. Sometimes the tone was flirtatious good cheer. The message, though, always implied Symonds’ idealized connection of love between men with dedication to the pure life of the mind and of art, “the pure and independent passions of the mind and of the imagination.” In early 1901, William and Alice saw the young man in Rome. William was particularly taken by his “strangely fascinating” statues, “ideally significant of human nature before its eating of the fruit of the fatal tree,” the paradox of a self-conscious nudity that seemed to deny sexuality. “We have both, you see, you and I,” Henry wrote to Andersen, “such endowed brothers, that we can boast of them.” As soon as William left for Nauheim in July 1901, James urged Andersen to come to Rye, particularly to rest after a difficult winter of illness and frustration with his work. At Lamb House, “a small but secure apartment opens, from to-night, to its utmost width to you, and holds itself open till you come. Isn’t it possible for you to come” and remain until you are “wholly rested and consoled and cheered.” Let me feel that [my friendship] “reaches you and that it sustains and penetrates.” To his delight, Andersen came in September, mostly to try to get commissions in London. “I am very fond of him and it will be a good change for me,” he wrote to his mother. By comparison, James was ecstatic. “Your letter has been a joy.… Think of me as impatiently and tenderly yours.” The difference highlighted the disparity in passion and commitment. To James’s disappointment, Andersen stayed only a week. “I miss you—keep on doing so—out of all proportion to the too few hours you were here—and even go so far as to ask myself whether visits so damnably short haven’t more in them to groan, than to thank for.… Addio, caro.… I can’t bear not to know your nightmares. I hold you close.…”39
Hendrik was devastatingly shattered in January 1902 when the recently married Andreas unexpectedly died. James responded with his characteristically loving, supportive compassion, his desire to comfort and even heal with the touch of his hands, the warmth of his embrace, the articulation of his empathy. “Your news fills me with horror and pity, and how can I express the tenderness with which it makes me think of you and the aching wish to be near you and put my arms round you? My heart fairly bleeds and breaks at the vision of you alone … with the haunting, blighting, unbearable sorrow. The sense that I can’t help you, see you, talk to you, touch you, hold you close and long, or do anything to make you rest on me, and feel my participation—this torments me, dearest boy, makes me ache for you.… I wish I could go to Rome and put my hands on you (oh how lovingly I should lay them!).” Come to England, he urged, “so that I might take consoling, soothing, infinitely close and tender and affectionately-healing possession of you.” I would “put my arm round you and make you lean on me as on a brother and a lover.… I will nurse you through your dark passage.” Henry had already begun nursing William. His pain at Hendrik’s loss resonated with his love for William. When Henry suddenly collapsed at the end of January with a painful bowel infection, he needed nursing of his own. He had a few weeks of thinking himself close enough to death’s door for Andreas’ death and Hendrik’s misery to resonate with his own accumulation of the deaths of people who had been precious to him. “I’ve gone through Death, and Death, enough in my long life,” he wrote to Hendrik at the end of February, “to know how all that we are, all that we have, all that is best of us within, our genius, our imagination, our passion, our whole personal being, become then but aides and channels and open gates to suffering, to being flooded. But, it is better so. Let yourself go and live, even as a lacerated, mutilated lover, with your grief, your loss, your sore, unforgettable consciousness. Possess them and let them possess you, and life, so, will still hold you in her arms, and press you to her breast, and keep you, like the great merciless but still most enfolding and never disowning mighty Mother, on and on for things to come.”40
Andersen, though, hardly came to England, and James went not at all to Italy during these years. When he indirectly asked Andersen to live with him, the invitation probably did not presume an overtly sexual relationship. Emotional companionship and convivial embraces may have been what his imagination evoked. In effect, he got neither. Andersen had other preoccupations, familial and professional. He soon brought his mother, as well as his younger brother, his sister, and Andreas’ widow, to Rome to live with him. As to his lost brother, “Andreas is not dead,” he wrote to his sister-in-law. “He has only gone before us. There is no death. It is only a sleep that comes over us.” On his way to America in late summer 1902, he did not, to James’s disappointment, visit him in England. James registered pain but no offense. If only he could come to Italy, they would have time together. “The dream … is always there, and you are always in the dream, and the fact of your being so counts immensely in making me work and strive and pray, and say to you Hold on tight and have patience with me and I will repay you tenfold.”41
But disinterest and illness kept Andersen away, particularly a long hospital treatment for Ménière’s disease in Turin, where he claimed to have astounded the doctors with his invulnerability to pain. In Rome, he had his studio and the American artists’ community. He met Edith Wharton, who was spending the winter of 1903 in Italy and whom he knew of from Newport—the woman, he told his sister-in-law, who “lived down Ledge Road” and who “has written some interesting books.… She seems fond of meeting titled people and has a very cunning little dog and I don’t think her literary success is turning her head.” When Andersen did visit Lamb House again, briefly, in October 1903, James was delighted, though Andersen’s schedule necessitated that he come at a time when James had other visitors also. It was a less intimate occasion than James had hoped for. “I meanwhile pat you affectionately on the back, across Alps and Apennines. I draw you close, I hold you long.” Just as Fullerton remained elusive, so too did Andersen. The elusiveness partly was inherent in the lack of full sexual self-definition in the relationship. With Fullerton, more explicit sexual considerations might have been possible at the beginning, if they had been possible for James. With Andersen, they were probably out of the question from the beginning. The young sculptor believed that “the meeting of physical bodies is nothing and never can be. It is the meeting of mental forces that count, and that force has always been first.”42 Whether or not the claim rationalized a frightened evasion of the intense homoeroticism that Andreas’ double portrait embodied, it probably did mean that he was, always, a safe match for James’s own evasions.
So too was Gaillard Lapsley, another American with whom James became warmly friendly from their first meeting in 1897, when Lapsley was twenty-six. The relationship never took on the intensity of his friendships with Fullerton and Andersen. “I like & am easy with all young creatures who like me,” James wrote to Grace Norton. He felt innocently fraternal and avuncular. Equally safe was Percy Lubbock, and later Hugh Walpole, partly because James had with these young men the tacit understanding that anything beyond warm embraces would be distasteful to him, and also because they and James never defined themselves as homosexuals. They all apparently expressed their homoeroticism emotionally rather than physically. A pupil of Arthur Benson’s at Eton, Lubbock, a handsome young man “of long limb & candid countenance,” probably met James in 1900 when Lubbock, at the age of twenty-one, seemed a prodigy of literary sensitivity and literary ambition. He immediately fell in love with James. “I am touched by what you tell me,” James told a mutual friend, “of the young Percy & quite envy him.” He wished, though, he were “a worthier object” of Percy’s love. James met Lapsley through Isabella Gardner in London in the winter of 1897-1898. A Harvard graduate, with an advanced degree in medieval history, Lapsley became, for a brief time, a frequent dinner and theatre companion. When he returned to America to take up a position at the University of California in Berkeley and then to live briefly in Philadelphia, James missed his “beautiful & gentle, though somewhat inadequately robust & reckless … young friend,” who had visited a number of times at Lamb House before the end of the century. “I miss you, in truth, at all times,” James wrote to him in California in 1902, “and when you tell me that you too are solitary, am disposed to urge it upon you to chuck up your strange and perverted career [at Berkeley] and come over here and share my isolation.” Finally, in 1904, with the prospect of a lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge, Lapsley determined on his own expatriation. “This is brave & beautiful news,” James responded, “& I have nothing for it but jubilation.… It is the very best thing you can possibly do, & … the prospect of having you here seems to reveal to me how all the while I have been quite mournfully &, as it were, lawfully, logically … missing you.”43
James had no sense that he had ever stepped over the clearly demarcated physical boundary into unlawfulness. But he knew that the boundary existed. He looked at it quite deliberately, and allowed himself the feelings and the language of transgression in these relationships, but not more. As James remarked from Rome in 1899 to Howard Sturgis, there is nothing “so indelicate as a bed!”44 Closer to him in age than his other new male friends, Sturgis, almost forty-five years old when they revivified their relationship in 1899, soon became his closest, most emotionally sympathetic companion. He provided a connection between a past that they both shared and a turn away from it into freer, more openly expressed relationships. A sturdy, prematurely gray man, with wavy hair, a wide, dark mustache, and bright eyes below dark full eyebrows, Sturgis had a less restrictive sense than James of the indelicacy of beds. Though a New Englander, he had been less molded by the Puritan tradition.
James had seen him as an adolescent in his father’s London and country homes, the spoiled child of a possessive mother whose relationship with her favorite son was claustrophobically intimate. After schooling at Eton and Cambridge, where he revealed admirable acting skills in female roles, he lived at home. His closest relationship, other than with his parents, had been with his Eton tutor, with whom he maintained a lifelong mutual devotion and with whom he spent long periods of time. With his father’s death in 1887, he inherited a fortune and a mother who was more than lover or wife. With his mother’s death in 1888, he found himself, as Edith Wharton, who met him in Newport in 1889, later remarked, “a middle-aged man, as lost and helpless as a child.” Literary in his tastes and sensibilities, an entertaining mimic and conversationalist, Sturgis published two novels in the 1890s, one of which, Tim: A Story of Eton, embodies a homoerotic fantasy—in the tradition of Tennyson’s In Memoriam—about which it is difficult to tell whether the homoerotic elements are the result of innocent, unconscious confusions or are self-consciously subversive. Sturgis was not in the least embarrassed by his cross-gender eccentricities, including his preference for warm shawls and knitting needles. The latter were constantly in his hands at Queen’s Acre, the “commodious Victorian house” at Windsor that he purchased in the 1890s and that became the hospitable center for family visitors and for his growing circle of male friends—which soon included Lapsley, Lubbock, Benson, and then Walpole, as well as James—and whose primary co-occupant was his lifelong companion, William Haynes, familiarly known as the Babe. “Our dear Howard is like a cake,” Lubbock later quoted James as remarking, “a richly sugared cake—always on the table. We sit round him in a circle and help ourselves.”45
To whatever degree the bed and the cake went together for Sturgis and Haynes and for any of the visitors to the lively household at Qu’Acre, James had no difficulty with these relationships. Sturgis’ homosexuality was unthreateningly benign. It was eccentric rather than flamboyant. James enjoyed the warmth, the emotional closeness, the constantly familial holding of hands. “I can never pray for myself, but I can, in a manner, for my friends,” he had confided to Fullerton. He often prayed that Sturgis would be less “oppressed with company—with the multitudinous penalty of your hospitality & other graces,” particularly the depredations of a vast number of American relatives who came frequently and stayed for long periods. “There’s nothing so tragic in life as to be generous & to have let it be discovered,” James wrote to him. “It’s not for our vices we pay, but for our Virtues.” Sometimes quite lonely at Lamb House, he urged Sturgis to escape his visitors by coming to stay with him. “The potted chicken shall be sacrificed to you; the house swept & garnished; the retinue freshly drilled.” It was a long-deferred friendship for which they were both ready.
After Sturgis made his first visit early in 1900, James, exchanging presents afterward, pronounced it “our so happy little congress of two.” In the Green Room, he had read to him each evening from his work-in-progress, The Ambassadors. Sturgis was at work on a new novel, the details of which he shared with his host, who urged him on. James began frequent visits to Qu’Acre, which he had visited as early as 1897, at least to the extent that work and his Lamb House routines permitted. “Dearest Howard” seemed more and more “a fairy prince,” a friend as intelligent, as conversational, as emotionally responsive as he had ever had. And also as sustaining and supportive. “You are indeed as a missing mother to me, & I, babi-like, (though indeed as if you hadn’t Babe enough & to spare!) gurgle back my gratitude.” James was serious as well as affectionately flirtatious, when, in 1903, he both memorialized a visit by Sturgis to Lamb House and urged a further visit with a vision of a domesticity that might have been. “Yes—I could have lived with you. That is you might with me!”46
He also somewhat carelessly, that same year, gave well-meaning but insensitive criticism of Sturgis’ new novel, Belchamber, particularly the passivity of the autobiographical main character. Part of the novel Sturgis had read to him. He now read all of it in manuscript. “You keep up the whole thing bravely—& I recognize the great difficulty involved in giving conceivability to your young man’s marriage.” But he should “not be all passivity & nullity.” Deeply wounded, Sturgis declared that he would not publish the novel. James apparently failed to realize, or realize in time, that Sturgis’ failure in depicting the marriage echoed the author’s traumatic memories of his mother and his rejection of heterosexual relationships. Shocked, even horrified, he soothingly begged Sturgis to reconsider. “It all holds the attention from beginning to end, and has never a dull nor ineffectual page nor moment. So the public will declare.… If you think of anything so insane,” he argued, “you will break my heart and bring my grey hairs, the few left me, in sorrow and shame to the grave.… If it springs from anything I have said to you I must have expressed myself with strange and deplorable clumsiness.” Sturgis’ sensitivity to criticism matched his own. Neither James nor Sturgis referred to the autobiographical sore points that James’s criticism had raked. To James’s great relief, Sturgis published the novel. Though Sturgis continued to write, he apparently never attempted to publish any other fiction thereafter.47
While Sturgis worked on Belchamber, James wrote his most powerful short story on the subject of sexual and marital inaction, confused sexual identity, and evasive personal self-deception—“The Beast in the Jungle.” Perhaps he had seen in Gosse’s letter to Symonds or perhaps Gosse had mentioned to him his reference to his struggles with “the wild beast” of homosexual desire that “is not dead, but tamer; I understand him & the tricks of his claws.” Whatever James understood about his own desires, he expressed them indirectly with dramatic power in the story of “a man haunted,” as he put it in his notebook in August 1901, “by the fear, more and more, throughout his life, that something will happen to him.”48 The sense of special destiny that determines much of John Marcher’s life turns out in the end to be his emotional inability to love, which suggests sexual impotence. Deeply repressed feelings lie in wait to takes revenge against him, to spring out as a hallucinatory embodiment of his inner emptiness, his massive unfeeling egoism, and his lifelong repression of his own sexuality. It springs out into consciousness and takes its revenge when he knows what it is he has done, what he has missed, what he has been incapable of. The beast that he has repressed has the same claws as the homoerotic desires against which Gosse struggled.
Because he has a deeply vested interest in maintaining self-deception or even ignorance about his sexual identity, Marcher never permits himself to be self-questioning about sexuality, relationships, marriage. He allows himself to be totally oblivious to what it is that is absent from his sense of himself and his life. Unlike James, he apparently never even considers what it is he has forgone, as if a repression so powerful is at work that not the slightest tremor of sexuality or self-awareness can surface. At May Bartram’s funeral, he begins to feel the presence of “the beast,” the loosening of repression, the coming to consciousness of what he has always repressed. Soon after, visiting her grave and seeing the ravaged face of a nearby mourner, he has a sudden insight into the depth of love and pain that face expresses. He has allowed himself at last to become aware of what it is that has prevented him from loving May Bartram.49 Suddenly, horrifyingly, he is aware that he has missed love and passion—represented in heterosexual terms by the opportunity that was given him from the beginning to respond to May’s love for him and to feel deeply thereafter whatever love and time offered him—even, at her death, the opportunity to have had his face and heart ravaged by deep feeling. What he has missed, most fully and devastatingly, is himself.
For Marcher, there is no second chance, no renewal—an embodiment of James’s nightmare vision of never having lived, of having missed the depths and the passions of life, of having denied love and sexuality. His experience with Constance Fenimore Woolson tremulously informs the surface pattern of the story and the depiction of May Bartram. James did indeed ponder what he had missed. Marcher, who is not an artist, cannot claim the relevance of an incompatibility between art and marriage—that rationalization must have seemed slim, both consciously and unconsciously, even to James. It was not devotion to art alone that kept him from loving women. It was also a deep fear of the experience itself, primarily based on his indirectly articulated panic about what the experience would entail for him. At some level, the story suggests, he sensed that such an effort would be a misplaced failure. For Marcher, awareness, let alone contemplation of the alternative, is frighteningly traumatic. Not once ever desiring her or any other woman, he has missed the opportunity to love May Bartram because of his incapacity to function heterosexually. His most effective defense against the potentially frightening, perhaps disabling, confrontation with homoerotic desire has been the renunciation of physical sexual relationships entirely.
In various forms, many of them disguises, such a retreat from overt sexuality had been central to James’s life and work, one of the hidden sources of dramatic power and obsession. He could not get it out of his mind or his stories. In his relationships with Morton Fullerton and Hendrik Andersen, he had, for the first time, articulated his obsession. At the beginning of the new century, Henry Adams, having in hand a copy of the The Sacred Fount, finally found what he believed to be his crucial point of identity with his old, somewhat puzzling friend. “Harry and I had the same disease, the obsession of the idée fixe.… It is insanity, and I think that Harry must soon take a vacation, with most of the rest of us, in a cheery asylum.”50 But he was on the loose and working harder than ever. It was also going extraordinarily well. There was seemingly no end to his artistic cunning, his obsessive imaginative inventiveness, in dramatizing the interconnections between his life and his art.
( 4 )
Sometimes looking out through the bow windows at the occasional traffic on West Street, sometimes staring down at the manuscript or the letters on his table, he sat in the “little ancient garden house” that he had “converted into an excellent work-room or ‘study.’” His secretary was away in London for a few days. The usually “regular Remington-ticker” was quiet, dictation postponed for the moment. “The doors and windows” are “open to the garden & the birds twitter & the insects hum & the butterflies.” Workmen were repairing the greenhouse. Drawing his breath in, he found pleasant “the queer musty odor” of the large fig tree that provided a Mediterranean screen for the window near where he sat.51
From his desk in the garden house he had a clear view of the advantages and the disadvantages of life at Rye. It was not always summer at Lamb House. Sometimes he was bored, particularly in the cold months, which seemed to him increasingly dreary after the rosy bloom of his first two winters. He was often lonely. With De Vere Gardens rented and then the lease sold, he had no London winter quarters, though, at about the time of the purchase of Lamb House, he had put his name down at the Reform Club for “one of the valued bedrooms.” Neither of his two other clubs, the Athenaeum and the Savile, offered permanent rooms, just as Rye did not offer year-round company. During the summer months, he had Fanny and George Prothero nearby—the latter a distinguished historian and editor of the Quarterly Review—new friends whom he grew to like and rely on socially. Up the hill at Playden, the beautiful Lady Maude Warrender, a talented amateur singer and avid hostess, whom he found amusing, held court. H. G. Wells, whom he had recently met and whom he admired more for his energy and ideological “cheek” than for his literary skills, built a house in 1900 at nearby Sandgate. Spade House was close enough to seem accessible but far enough away to make visits impractical, though an exchange of hospitality in June 1901 had Wells bringing the novelist George Gissing to stay overnight at Lamb House. Kipling at Rottingdean was close but not close enough—”poor great little Rudyard,” who seemed to James a combination of talent and brutality. A visit to Kipling demanded either that Kipling send his car to transport James, which he did on a few occasions, or that James go all the way to London in order to get a train to Rottingdean. It was not very practical.52
When Stephen Crane, a twenty-eight-year-old American journalist and novelist, constantly in need of money, and whom James had met in London in 1898, rented Brede House, eight miles from Rye, James had another potential literary friend in the neighborhood. He bicycled over for conversation, for a Christmas party with amateur theatricals, and for a large tea party on the immense Brede House terrace. The view of valley and hills from the terrace was splendid, a view and a residence, whatever its disrepair and discomfort, for which Crane never paid its owner any of the rent. The cavernous, impractical disarray of Brede House matched the chaos of Crane’s menagerie, which included his companion, a former prostitute from Florida, frequent visitors, the adopted children of a friend, constant poverty and hackwork, a usually bare pantry, and Crane’s mostly disregarded, rapidly progressing, fatal tuberculosis. James, who liked Crane, thought his situation sadly, tragically impossible, and the sheer anarchic muddle of his environment distasteful. In a desperate effort to save Crane’s life, Cora Crane raised money to take him to a German health resort, to which James unhesitatingly contributed fifty pounds, “which was really, out of pity for him, more substantial than I could afford.” He later refused to send anything more, having come to the conclusion that Cora was fraudulently using the money for her own purposes. When, in June 1900, he bicycled over to Brede with some friends to show them the austere, handsome exterior of the house, “the melancholy of it,” he wrote to Cora in Germany, “was quite heart-breaking.” Later the same day, the news of Crane’s death reached him in Rye. “What a brutal, needless extinction—what an unmitigated unredeemed catastrophe! I think of him with such a sense of possibilities and powers.”53
For a short while, there were two other literary friends nearby; twenty-seven-year-old Ford Madox Hueffer—later, during the next war, to change his last name to Ford—an easygoing poet and aspiring novelist; and Joseph Conrad, the forty-three-year-old Polish-born English novelist. Conrad had started vocational life as a sailor, had learned English working on English merchant ships, and had begun to publish, in the mid-1890s, a series of novels that James read and deeply admired. When, in 1902, Gosse rallied support for a Royal Society of Literature grant for the constantly impoverished Conrad, James testified both privately and publicly to his esteem. “I lose not an hour in responding to your request about Conrad,” he wrote to Gosse, “whom I had not in the least known to be in the state you mention. It horrifies me more than I can say.” His formal letter to the society epitomizes the effective foundation recommendation. “His production … has all been fine, rare & valid.… His successive books have been real literature, of a distinguished sort.… The Nigger … is in my opinion the very finest & strongest picture of the sea & sea-life that our language possesses—the master-piece in a whole great class; & Lord Jim runs it very close. When I think moreover that such completeness, such intensity of expression has been arrived at by a man not born to our speech … I greatly hope that the Royal Literary Fund may be able to do something for him.” Conrad no doubt owed to James and Gosse the three-hundred-pound grant that he received the next month. Years later, James was to write to Conrad praise from his heart to Conrad’s private ear. “I read you as I listen to rare music—with deepest depths of surrender, and out of those depths I emerge slowly and reluctantly again, to acknowledge that I return to life.… You stir me … to amazement and you touch me to tears.”54
He had a substantial friendship with neither Conrad nor Hueffer. Conrad, who admired James, sent him a copy of An Outcast of the Islands in 1896. Reciprocating with The Spoils of Poynton, James entertained Conrad for lunch at De Vere Gardens early the next year. Despite his respect for Conrad, he apparently had no sense of the possibility of anything more than a professional friendship. Ford Madox Hueffer, a great admirer of James’s fiction, was the grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had just written. Hueffer introduced himself to James in Rye in 1896, hoping that James would review the book favorably. The next year, eager for company, James extended an open-ended invitation to Hueffer to visit at the newly leased Lamb House. Hueffer, in 1898, sublet his farmhouse, on the northern part of the Romney Marsh in Kent, to Conrad, whom he had just met, and who had agreed to collaborate with Hueffer on a novel. Hueffer stayed nearby. In 1901, he moved to Winchelsea, a short walk from Rye. There he negotiated the difficulties of his collaboration with Conrad, which James thought absurd, and of his complicated personal life, which included a love affair with his sister-in-law.
In Rye, James was a treasured resource, with whom Hueffer had occasional afternoon walks, often along the Winchelsea road and up the steep hill to the medieval town with its channel vista. James’s essay, “Winchelsea, Rye, and ‘Denis Duval,’” written before Hueffer’s arrival and published in Scribner’s in 1901, captures James’s love of both towns and some of the spirit of the walks they were to have. They also had some winter evenings over a blazing fire. James found Hueffer amiable, likable, worshipful, sometimes foolish, occasionally intrusive—at worst, acceptable company—at best, a pleasure to talk to. On one occasion, James mistakenly assumed that Hueffer was soliciting a loan and offered to lend him money. Conrad, collaborating with Hueffer, came regularly to Winchelsea. At Christmas, 1899, he and James were guests in the bohemian chaos of the Christmas revels at Brede House. They had some time together, apparently, though not much. Conrad was unavailable for spontaneous walks and chatter. Hueffer, who was, had his limitations, and the writers who lived in the Romney Marsh area in the ten years around the turn of the century neither formed a regular social community nor, for various reasons, provided James with opportunities for sustained companionship.55
When, late in 1900, he learned that he could have a bedroom at the Reform Club much sooner than he had expected, he was delighted. He needed to have a London alternative. No matter how many visitors came to Lamb House during the summer months, the winters were mostly desolate. Annie Fields and her companion, Sarah Orne Jewett, whose The Country of the Pointed Firs he thought “really exquisite,” came in the summer of 1898, happily evoking for him memories of “my far-away youth … where she was so pretty & I was so aspiring.” Apparently, those years were much on his mind, even in resonantly comic ways. He was startled when his terrier, one in a series of dogs with which he had bad luck and sadly buried in his garden, seemed to have an “extraordinary facial resemblance to the late James T. Fields,” the Boston publisher and editor of the Atlantic. “It’s one of the funniest likenesses I ever saw (and most startling); and yet I can’t write to Mrs. Fields of my daily joy in it.… I’ve wintered as well as summered” at Lamb House, he told Mrs. Fields, “& wintered perhaps enough.” Homesick for London and abysmally lonely, he vowed that he would never again spend a winter in Sussex. “Nose to nose with the dark, wet country winter … I pine for the sound of the buses & the colour of the jars, at night, in the chemist’s windows.… My hibernating here (a second time,) has been a somewhat unconsidered accident.” Sometimes the advantage that isolation provided for work was irresistible, and bearable. In the cold January of 1900, “mere diluvian sleet and slush rule the day,” he wrote to William, “a muddle of snow & rain & biting wind, & a fall of sudden snow tonight, over all. But the green room holds its own … & fosters my genius each a.m.” When working well, he readily admitted that “the lack of human intercourse is rather excessive,” but “I don’t in the least mind it—& do [like] … the freedom & quiet & the favourable way my little work ticks on.” When he felt lonely, “the long stretch of short days & measureless rains” seemed unbearable. “Then you see why ‘man made the town’—& pavements & gaslamps & shop-windows & clubs:”56 In the summer, usually, there were too many guests, a procession of London and American visitors. Some of them he quartered at the nearby Mermaid Inn, others he had to deal with in his own house, often with a strain that he felt, in its way, as difficult as winter isolation.
He liked being master of a house, but he did not like the responsibility and the work. It irked, bored, and tired him. Fortunately, in an economy in which they cost, by modern standards, next to nothing, he was able to afford servants to do much of the work, as distinct from the worrying, of which he did a great deal. He employed a general housemaid, a gardener, a houseboy, and the Smiths, with whom his long-standing, precarious relationship ended, finally, in September 1901. Lamb House suddenly became “a scene of woe.” With three guests in the house, the Smiths, having been abysmally drunk for days, collapsed into paralyzed incoherence. James called the local doctor. Medication made no difference. He soon got Smith out of the house. Mrs. Smith’s sister came to take her away. He was shocked to learn that the Smiths had spent on drink every penny they had earned and that there were outstanding liquor debts, which he soon paid along with generous severance money. “The romance of sixteen years is closed, and I sit tonight amid the ruins it has left behind.… They were, at the end, simply two saturated and demoralized victims, with not a word to say for themselves and going in silence to their doom; but great is the miracle of their having been, all the while, the admirable servants they were and whom I shall ever unutterably mourn and miss.” He felt even more lonely and unprotected. “I miss Mrs. Smith’s cuisine and Smith’s hourly ministrations.” For a while he could get no work done and felt as if he almost wanted “to close the house and bolt altogether.” His cries, he recognized, were “a puerile wail.”57 But he felt betrayed and adrift. The domestic order that he had counted on had become a chaos.
With his new base at the Reform Club, he had London regularly available to him at a very economical price. He needed, he felt, to avoid winters in Rye. With the servant problem soon under control, with a new, excellent cook, magisterially referred to as Mrs. Paddington, and the increasingly reliable, useful houseboy, Burgess Noakes, he could alternate between Rye and London. “I’ve at last got reconstituted,” he wrote to Ariana Curtis late in 1901, “with 3 women & a houseboy—& feel under petticoat sway as never before.” When, after a long absence, he had returned to town in March 1900, he had found London “most pleasant & refreshing; & every one, old friends, acquaintances, &c, such as I have seen, have greeted me almost as if I had returned from African or Asian exile. Every one has been absurdly kind & welcoming.” What had seemed stale to him in 1898 now seemed “most renewedly amusing & exciting.” By early December 1900, he had his Reform Club perch, “a town-cradle for my declining years,” where he installed bed, window blinds, and curtains. He stored his London clothes there. Service was fully provided by an excellent butler in a room longer than wide, with a fireplace and space for a typist, in easy walk of everything, near Charing Cross Station and trains to Rye, looking “full (due) South—high, high up.” From his room, he saw “nothing, across the charming Carlton House Terrace ‘gardens’ but embassies & lordly houses.” In the mornings, just as at Lamb House, from about ten or ten-thirty, to about one or one-thirty in the afternoon, he dictated to his secretary. At first MacAlpine filled this position, though he soon arranged an amicable parting. “It’s simply that he’s too damned expensive, & always has been—& too place-taking in my life & economy. I can get a highly competent little woman for half.… It’s simply that I don’t want to put so much more money into dictating than I need.”58 With MacAlpine, he had felt a social obligation to take at least lunch and walks together in Rye. In town, he could hire a woman who would make less money and fewer demands. Soon he hired an attractive, undemanding young lady, Mary Weld, who, beginning in early 1901, took his dictation in London and in Rye.
In town, he could see Lucy Clifford regularly as well as a new friend, Jessie Allen, whom he had met in 1899 at the Palazzo Barbaro. A friend of the Curtises, she was a witty, generous, well-connected widow with little money of her own but with contacts that kept her constantly at the homes of the great. She had taken such a fancy to him that their relationship became a warm continuum of gift exchanges—though mostly from her to him—and happy conversations. Many of his literary and social friends from the 1880s were gone. “I have lost sight of many people & greatly simplified my London contacts, but there are always people enough & the simplification blesses. Besides, half my friends are dead, & the other half, including myself, soon will be—so nothing much matters.” The ever-faithful Gosse was his regular companion. Sargent, like others he would have been happy to see, had disappeared, in his case only into the social stratosphere inhabited by the most successful living portrait painter. He moves, James reported to the curious Henrietta Reubell, “in an orbit so much larger & higher than mine that I only see him as you see a far sail, at sea, passing on the horizon—a big shining ship that leaves your own slow steamer behind. He sails over the rim & the great curve of the globe—straight for the Golden Isles.”59
He himself sailed, between 1901 and 1904, despite the trepidations of time, lovers, servants, the problems of rural isolation, and the anxieties of William’s illness, into his own Golden Isles. It was a period of sustained creativity in which he brought to bear the self-focusing intensity of the artistic and experiential lessons of a lifetime. His eye was still on his financial needs, which at some moments he evaluated realistically, and at others distorted with the semipanic of someone who had expected to have much more and feared he would have much less. He felt a sustained bitterness at what seemed to him, comparatively, the paltriness of his earnings. Serial publication, from which much of his income had come, was now more difficult to effect. Fortunately, in late 1897, the ever-reliable Howells had arranged publication of The Awkward Age in Harper’s Weekly for the unexpectedly high sum of three thousand dollars, “exactly what would have been the form of my golden dream,” James told him. For the moment, he felt validated, revivified. “I [had] felt myself,” he told Howells, “somehow perishing in my pride or rotting ungathered, like an old maid against the wall and on her lonely bench.”60 The money helped pay for Lamb House. He also, at last, had an agent again, the excellent James Pinker, who began to organize his copyrights and sell his fiction in a professional manner, as he was also doing for Conrad, Crane, Wells, and others. Pinker was the first literary agent who emphasized the connection between the British and American markets. Under Pinker’s guidance, Methuen, which paid more generously than his previous publishers, became his main, though not his only, British publisher. James felt that at least he was in good hands. With Pinker’s help, against the obstacles of an increasingly indifferent reading public, his income from writing for the next eight years averaged about five thousand dollars a year, which he supplemented with about three thousand dollars a year from the Syracuse property. Though less in demand, at least he was being more effectively sold.
Often he felt as if he were being sold out, not by Pinker or Howells, but by a world that devalued what he did. He managed frequently enough to put that aside, particularly during his sustained burst of creative energy between 1901 and 1904. He had enough ironic good humor to “greatly applaud the tact” with which one of his best readers, Howard Sturgis, told him “that scarce a human being will understand a word, or an intention, or an artistic element or glimmer of any sort, of The Awkward Age.… But it’s an old, old story—& if I ‘minded’ now as much as I once did, I should be well beneath the sod.” He knew what he did not want to write, the kind of bluntly undershaped, psychologically unmodulated novel like Hardy’s “great success,” Jude the Obscure, which he thought “ineffably dreary & stupid.” He had enough money for his needs. His expenses were quite manageable. He had the security of Lamb House, the availability of London. He had friends whom he kept at a distance that allowed him to maintain, more or less, his emotional equilibrium and his work patterns. He had a new excellent typist to whom he could dictate. His creative voice was now liberated from the limitations of his tired hand and his semilegible handwriting. His own voice, in the garden room and in his high perch at the Reform Club, modulated, with rhythmic energy, into fictional representations that epitomized a lifetime of reaching for such fulfillments. “He dictated beautifully,” Mary Weld recalled. “He had a melodious voice and in some way he seemed to be able to tell if I was falling behind. Typewriting for him was exactly like accompanying a singer on the piano.”61 When he dictated, apparently his stammer disappeared.
“The joy of production, with me, almost limits itself to feeling the silver cord positively not snap,” he wrote to Mary Ward in October 1900. He had just put together a new book of short stories, which he somehow managed to keep writing at the same time that he worked on longer fictions. He “began a new book the instant the old one was finished.” That was “his only chance,” he told Arthur Benson, “because he worked so slowly, and excised so much.” In November 1900, he corrected the proofs of The Sacred Fount, destined to have even fewer readers than The Awkward Age. Originally a short story, the subject of which was “a small fantasticality,” it had irrepressibly expanded into a complicated experiment in dialogue and point of view whose richnesses remained, for most readers, obscured by its demands for an attention and concentration that few novelists had ever dared request. “My hand-to-mouth economy condemned me,” he confessed, “to put it through in order not to have wasted the time already spent. So, only, it was that I hatingly finished it; trying only to make it—the one thing it could be—a consistent joke. Alas, for a joke it appears to have been, round about me here, taken rather seriously.” He had begun two other novels, one of which, The Sense of the Past, a response to Howells’ request for an international ghost story, he soon put aside. He was more interested in the ghosts of his own present. The novel that he had first formulated in response to Jonathan Sturges’ account of Howells’ Paris comments, about never having lived fully enough, provided the ideational germ for the novel that now preoccupied him, The Ambassadors. Pinker had arranged its serialization “from next autumn on.… The date gives me time, but the curse … is that if one catches hold of a subject good enough to—well, to be good enough, it is also good enough to be damnably difficult. That side of my job fills all my consciousness now.”
By March 1901, he felt “intensely and inexorably” bound to the new novel. “I can’t get away from [it] for a day.” He kept at it through the spring and early summer of 1901, his spirits buoyed by his sense of achievement. “Oh, sacred days that are still somehow there—that it would be the golden gift and miracle, to-day, still to find not wasted.” Sending, in early July, the final sections to Pinker for transmission to the North American Review, he held back three and a half chapters of the manuscript, which had exceeded the length agreed upon.62 At the same time that he sent off the manuscript of The Ambassadors, he asked Pinker to negotiate with Scribner’s a postponement of its immediate due date until the end of 1901 a novel whose origin had been one of his notebook entries in 1894 and to which he now gave the title The Wings of the Dove. The Ambassadors had taken him six months longer to complete than he had expected.
By mid-July 1901, he was “well launched” into the new book, his only interruption the fulfillment of a deeply felt obligation to visit the Godkins near Epping, where the seriously ill Godkin had recently settled. Later in the year, he stayed a week at Torquay with Godkin—“old & very ill … & whom it has been a question of seeing now or probably never.” Wings had now been promised for January 1. He expected, he told Kipling, to “be occupied grinding my teeth and breaking my heart” until Christmas. By mid-January 1902, he had not finished—“In a desperate state of arrears … & so abashed & disgraced that I can do nothing else till the incubus in question is floored.” He stayed on in Rye, desperate both to have it done and to have the relief of London. By the end of the month, he still had not finished. To get away from Rye for the worst of the winter, he went to London at the end of January, where he came down with a painful bowel infection that sent him back almost immediately to the spaciousness and comparative comfort of Lamb House. The newspapers were wrong, he soon wrote to a friend, in reporting that he was so ill that he had to postpone indefinitely the completion of his novel.63
Just as the newspapers lied, publishers were unreliable. He finished Wings early in the spring, for autumn publication. But The Ambassadors still had not begun its “vulgarist Harper-‘serialization.’” It was to be delayed until 1903. Wings appeared in August 1902, though without the benefit of serial publication at all. Pinker had had no success in placing it with a magazine. “I pray night and day for its comparative prosperity, but no [magazine] publisher, alas … have told me that it has ‘taken their fancy.’ So I’m preparing for the worst,” he told Howells. The worst came. Howells’ optimism that an apartment building in Manhattan having recently been named “The Henry James” portended a revival of its namesake’s popularity seemed to James a bitter irony. Howells had clipped out the advertisement and sent it to James. “No power on earth can ever do that,” he responded. My books “are behind, irremovably behind, the public, and fixed there for my lifetime at least; and as the public hasn’t eyes in the back of its head, and scarcely even in the front, no consequences can ensue.” What he could and did do was hardly to lift his head from his writing desk. From late autumn 1902 to early 1903, working at it part-time, he fulfilled his long-standing promise to write a biography of Story—a book that he padded with long selections from Story’s letters—sorry that he had ever agreed to do it. The problem was that there was no subject. In review, Story seemed insubstantial. James’s only subject was the resonances of his own youth and the evocation of the Rome he had lived in as a young man. “One has to put as much as one can of one’s self in it to make up for all there is that is absent.”64 The subject of the American artist in Europe, of losses and gains, was much on his mind while writing Story’s biography. In late summer 1902, he began a new novel, The Golden Bowl, the idea for which he had sketched out in his notebook more than ten years before. By late February 1903, he had finished William Wetmore Story and His Friends. By the beginning of 1904, he had finished The Golden Bowl.
In the composition of The Ambassadors, Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, his lifelong preoccupations as a novelist were part of the rhythm of his voice as he dictated. These were to be the last completed novels he would write. The three novels embody a culmination of his concern with the international theme. Now raised to a level of intense complication and subtlety, the theme is transformed from the satirical comedy of misperception into a drama of the search for self-knowledge. In The Ambassadors, the novel he thought the most formally perfect of all his works, the main character, Lambert Strether, an American, “is the subject, the subject itself.”65 Having been dispatched to France in order to find out why young Chad Newsome declines to return to America, Strether—from whose point of view the reader sees the world of the novel—gradually realizes that he himself gives more value to experience than to theory, to pleasure than to principle, to humane considerations than to moral codes. He has had to come to Europe to discover that he is a Jamesian pragmatist. Like James, Strether, who is about the same age as his creator, has the ambivalent satisfaction of being an observer observing himself making observations rather than a participant. He embodies James’s heightened sense, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of looking over his own shoulder at where he has come from and where he is now. For Strether, a depleted version of what James might have been if he had remained mostly at home, European residence is impossible. For James, it had become the only possibility. With his own eyes partly raised toward the possibility of a visit to America, James sends Strether back to Massachusetts to deal, as best he can, in terms of what he has learned and what has changed him, with what has remained the same.
In mid-December 1902, he wrote to Grace Norton that “you yourself, dear Grace, are a presence so terrifically arranged as an absence.”66 James had arranged many of the presences that meant most to him as absences. In Wings of the Dove, the central symbolic presence of the novel is Milly Theale, an imaginative transformation of James’s memory of Minny Temple and an allegorical representation of a version of “the American Girl.” She is the significant absence around whose symbolic nonpresence the two main characters position themselves in an effort to determine who they are and what they are capable of doing to resolve their crucial needs. Beautiful, determined, and energetic, the abandoned daughter of a manipulative, mercenary father, Kate Croy is the culmination of James’s long series of flawed heroines who must deal with the exigencies of the marriage market. The brilliant first scene of the novel, between father and daughter, propels into some degree of sympathetic credibility Kate’s actions and attitudes thereafter. Unwilling to marry Merton Densher—a working journalist for whom Morton Fullerton claimed to be the model—unless they can obtain enough money to live well, she conspires with Densher to encourage the wealthy, fatally ill Milly Theale to fall in love with him, which Milly does. Though aware that Densher has an agreement with Kate, she bequeaths him a large sum of money. After Milly’s death, the two Europeans must face the consequences of their success, a consequence complicated by Densher’s having, to some extent, fallen in love with Milly. Having had reservations about the conspiracy, Densher had, before he would proceed to encourage Milly, gently compelled Kate to consummate their love. Now he asks her to consent to his declining the inheritance. He had been open enough to fall in love with Milly, even if the realization of his love arises only after her death, and admirable enough never directly to lie to her. Now he insists that he and Kate do not need the money. The transforming experience has made him sufficiently strong to know that she must either make the choice that will allow them to marry or end the relationship. Her sexual attractiveness will not keep them together. Neither will their love for one another.
Unless Kate chooses to cooperate with him in not accepting the bequest, he knows that he and Kate are morally incompatible. They will be emotionally distressed and morally corroded if they do not renounce the money that they will have gotten by deception and through a gift of love. Kate accuses, Densher of being in love with Milly’s memory. “Her memory’s your love. You want no other.” But, he insists, if she will decline, he will do nothing more happily than marry her. “‘As we were?’ ‘As we were.’ But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. ‘We shall never be again as we were!’” Kate is right. The experience has changed the personal reality. James, the novelist of process, has achieved his most effective affirmation of the determining force of the flow of experience, of mind, of awareness itself, as the value that transcends all values.
His effort to depict consciousness, he believed, also demanded a style that embodied the rhythm of the way the mind moves, a constant interaction between the external consciousness of the authorial voice and the point of view of the individual character through whose eyes and mind experience is being dramatized. “I would have written, if I could,” he told Fullerton with stoic exasperation, “like Anthony Hope and Marion Crawford.” But he could not. Unlike the successful popular writers who were his contemporaries, he was always concerned with the “bottomless questions of How and Why and Whence and What—in connection with the mystery of one’s craft.… After all, it is the doing that best meets and answers them.” Aware that he often did not meet his own high standards, he patiently told Mary Ward that “I think I see the faults of my too voluminous fiction exhaustively myself; indeed when once my thing is done I see nothing but the faults.” Rereading The Ambassadors in 1903, it seemed to him to have “a kind of staleness & mistimedness in it.” He had, he confessed, “felt a good deal of despair after ‘The Ambassadors’ were launched, & said to myself ‘what can be expected for a novel with a hero of 55, & properly no heroine at all?’” Still, “I have slowly felt a little better, & the book is, intrinsically, I daresay, the best I have written.” As to Wings of the Dove, it had two or three major faults, one of which is that “the centre … isn’t in the middle, or the middle, rather, isn’t in the centre, but ever so much too near the end, so that what was to come after it is truncated.” As he worked on The Golden Bowl, he worried about the “the opposite disproportion—the body too big for its head.” But dictation, he believed, actually worked against the problems of misproportion and expansiveness, helping him to rewrite, to improve, to be more concise, “to do over and over, for which it is extremely adapted, and which is the only way I can do at all. It soon enough, accordingly, becomes intellectually, absolutely identical with the act of writing … so that the difference is only material and illusory—only the difference, that is, that I walk up and down: which is much to the good.” No matter what he did, though, sometimes he found “it all a too damnably difficult art—& have so to pretend that it isn’t! However, we pretend life isn’t, either.”67
In The Golden Bowl, James provided his most sustained dramatization of what he thought of as “everything”—his shorthand way of referring to consciousness, to its permutations and growth, and to the human and moral awareness that inevitably follows out of its fullest expression. He had no doubt that consciousness most fully expresses itself in relationships between people and between people and their culture. His own consciousness as narrator permeates the novel whose four main characters represent aspects of James’s experience. Amerigo, the resonantly named Italian prince, settled in London, marries one of the two American girls of the novel, Maggie Verver, and has an adulterous affair with the other, Charlotte Stant, the wife of Maggie’s father, Adam Verver. The latter, who has spent his recent years in Europe collecting treasures for the museum he has founded in American City, epitomizes an American businesses redeemed by art. The story moves in and through the mediated consciousnesses of three of the four characters. Adam Verver remains unrevealed. When Maggie discovers the adulterous relationship, she carefully, with stubborn, even ruthless, awareness of her selfhood and her strength, determines the only satisfactory resolution. In order to separate the lovers and fully regain her husband, she must separate from her father and stepmother. Adam and Charlotte return to America. Amerigo and Maggie remain in London. The price of consciousness, of awareness, and of the judgments and actions that experience demand, is a high one. In this particular contingent world, much as in James’s own experience, daughters must be separated from fathers, the young James from his family and from America. Early on, when given the opportunity by Mrs. Francis Bellingham to see the beautiful bowl, with “the tone of old gold,” that King George I had given to his hosts at Lamb House, James had his title and the symbolic representation of the deception.68 But he had from much farther back the psychological and artistic components of The Golden Bowl, whose nuances in regard to consciousness and perception had been in formation in his consciousness from his first visit to Europe as an infant. For James, the nuances of The Golden Bowl were more than part of “everything.” They created and defined the level of consciousness at work. They were beyond any morality but that of art.
( 5 )
After almost twenty years of absence, America was increasingly on his mind as the new century began. When he had a letter from a childhood friend, Edward Emerson, memories of Newport made him quiver with tender recollection of two worlds he had left behind, his country and his youth. “I don’t know that I could really quite bear to see again, with aged eyes, La Farge’s beautiful picture of Paradise Rocks—so many dead things would, with the vision, come again too touchingly to life. I’ve only to close those eyes, however, to call it all up.” His reawakened memories went back even farther, to “the Washington Squareish region trodden by the steps of my childhood, and I wonder,” he wrote to a new friend, Mary Cadwalader Jones, Edith Wharton’s former sister-in-law, “if you ever kick the October leaves as you walk in Fifth Avenue, as I can to this hour feel myself, hear myself, positively smell myself doing. But perhaps there are no leaves and no trees now in Fifth Avenue—nothing but patriotic arches, Astor hotels and Vanderbilt palaces.” He felt the October leaves gathering about him at Lamb House, the impending short twilights. When, in late 1900, he heard from Annie Fields of a London newspaper rumor that he was considering returning to live in America, he assured her that it was “wantonly woven of air; without a germ of justification at its root.… It’s embarrassing, ungracious, rude almost, to be saying it, but I am not returning to my native land to live or ceasing to live in this snug corner of this one.… Such is the shy, the stammering truth.”69 He wanted to revisit, not repatriate.
When Howard Sturgis visited America in autumn 1900, James wrote that “my own imagination recoils before such terrors—so that I always take a certain amount of convincing as to others. How you toss off these great things! I wish you could teach me your way. I must go once again, but am afraid to go alone & in fact don’t know how.” The notion that he must go had become set in his mind, at least as an injunction of the imagination, by late 1900. But there were obstacles. He feared the discomfort of the sea voyage itself. Having been sedentary for so long, he did not look forward to making the tedious arrangements, nor did he relish the temporary absence from domestic pleasures and familiar routines. If he went, he needed to do so in a pause between books and also to have some writing arrangement that would make the trip pay, or at least pay his expenses. He had a strong recommendation from an American acquaintance that he give readings in America “for the money and the boom.”70 He initially dismissed the idea; it may have revived a distasteful recollection of Wilde’s American tour in 1883. But it may also have, more beneficently, brought to mind Thackeray, whom he had met in his childhood home in New York in 1852, and Dickens, whose 1867 readings in Boston he had tried to attend. If he could manage the finances, he might be able to overcome the other obstacles to something he felt ambivalent about but still more and more interested in doing.
He most of all feared that he would return to a country so vastly changed that he might feel more than ever the permanent exile rather than the visiting son. “All reports of the land of my birth … are, to me, bewildering now, and I know not what to think of anything,” he wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes. Beyond all the obstacles, as he worked on his recent novels he felt increasingly drawn westward for what he expected would be one last time. “I have never been more curious” about America, “nor interested in it,” he wrote to Grace Norton. “The idea of seeing American life again & tasting the American air, that luxury & amusement [is] a very difficult one to organize. But if I could!—if I can!” If he went, he wanted to see more than he had ever seen before, more than the restricted travels of his American years. He would want not only to revisit the scenes of his childhood and youth but, for the first time, to see the South and the West, the palm trees of Florida, the shores of California. He wanted personal expansion, a final travel experience that he could write about. Paradoxically, it would be both a journey backward and forward to the patrimony he had voluntary given up and to the larger America that he had never made his own. At times, he doubted that he had the energy for such a voyage. “You strike me,” he wrote to a young friend, as “always in the thick of the fray, and I look at you through a hole in the curtain of a broken-down ambulance pulled off into a distant field.” He felt his age. His sixtieth birthday was rapidly approaching. Physically, he was fine, except for being enough overweight, so that with comic exaggeration, he thought of himself as “painfully fat.” Occasional attacks of the “gout-fiend” forced him off his feet. But the attacks were manageable. He need not stay home because of his health.71
If he went, he would have to protect his time from the press of too many social obligations—“Boston, New York, Washington, all making the most insidious signs to me.” Rye solitude made that threat less forceful than it otherwise might have been. He told Sarah Wister that he echoed “without the least reserve” her declaration that he “ought to come home again.… My native land, in my old age, has become, becomes more and more, romantic to me altogether: this one, on the other hand has, hugely and ingeniously ceased to be. But the case is, somehow, absurdly, indescribably difficult.” As much as he was at home in England, he was still a stranger. He missed living in a place that was genuinely home, particularly as his old age approached. But he was, he felt, “‘too late’… too late for myself. It would be grotesque to treat the molehill of a ‘run’ like the mountain of a repatriation (for that I am utterly too late—on all sorts of material grounds as well as others).” He was especially aware, as he wrote his biography of Story, of the price that he had paid for his expatriation. His own situation was the subtext between the lines. “Somehow, in the long-run, Story paid—paid for having sought his development” in Europe. “It was as if the circumstances on which, to do this, he had turned his back had found an indirect way to be avenged for the discrimination. Inevitably, indeed, we are not able to say what a lifetime of Boston would have made, in him, or would have marred; we can only be sure we should in that case have had to deal with quite a different group of results.” His imagination began to play with the alternative of what he himself might have been if he had never left. “You have written not Story’s life,” Adams wrote to him, “but your own and mine,—pure autobiography.… Improvised Europeans, we were, and—Lord God!—how thin!”72
As to his own visit, “I don’t, constitutionally, run; I creep and crawl and falter and fumble—and in short the question lives in a cloud of complications.” The complications gradually resolved themselves. Money had been much on his mind. The trip would be costly, and earnings from recent books hardly permitted him to feel financially expansive. The three hundred pounds he had received for each as an advance against royalties for The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl sufficiently exceeded earnings from sales to make him feel both resentful and anxious. When Pinker thought he had “a good opportunity” for American serial publication of The Golden Bowl, James “feverishly” divided it into twelve sections. “Then they cruelly cabled ‘Declined,’ “he told Howells, “& the Golden Dream was as broken outside, as the Golden Bowl within.” He wanted additional income to offset the cost of the trip. “I am scared, rather—well in advance,” he confessed to William, “by the vision of American expenses.” Every book he now published lost money for its publisher. From the generous Macmillan in June 1903, he accepted a proposal to write a book on London. It was to be illustrated by a young American artist Joseph Pennell for a series on European cities, which ironically had as one of its best-selling volumes Marion Crawford’s Ava Roma. James asked for and received an advance of a thousand pounds. He made it clear, though, that he would not do the book until after returning from America and completing an account of his American impressions for both serial and book publication. He was, he told Macmillan, “thinking, rather definitely, of going to America for 6 or 8 months (some time in 1904).”73 In early 1904, he delivered the completed manuscript of The Golden Bowl to Pinker, for American publication by Scribner’s in November 1904, when he expected to be in America, and British publication in early 1905.
William immediately expressed reservations about the wisdom of his brother’s tentative plans and stressed the difficulties he would confront returning to what he warned would seem an alien culture. Henry responded with defensive self-justification, as if he were still demonstrating his good sense to his parents, emphasizing that his “primary idea in the matter is absolutely economic.” He would have the subject for a new, well-paying book. His presence on the scene would facilitate making “old contracts pay better.” Most of all, if he did not go now he would perhaps never go at all. Like the four dogs he had buried “in the little cemetery in the angle” of his garden, he would, if he did not go, be burying himself in the form of a premature acceptance of “incipient senile decay.” America was his birthplace. He wanted to revisit before he was so old that he lost “the impulse to return.” The voyage, he felt, would be revivifying, a travel experience that would at least partly compensate for the more wide-ranging travel that he had never done. He had had, he felt, to give up, “one by one,” his visions of exotic places—Spain, Greece, Italy and Egypt—to which both Hay and Adams had invited him. He had always had, he believed, to stay at his desk, grinding away at the wheel of financial necessity. In fact, he recognized, he had hardly traveled at all. He was the most parochial of cosmopolitans. If William’s argument or his own timidity resulted in his forgoing this voyage, it would have “all the air of giving up, chucking away without a struggle, the one chance that remains to me in life of anything that can be called a movement: my one little ewe-lamb of possible exotic experience.”74
He had made up his mind that this was a spiritual and professional journey that he could not afford not to make. The obstacles were real, and represented by the maze of practical details that had to be attended to. On a dark mid-November afternoon in 1903, courteously seeing off aboard her transatlantic ship Tom Perry’s sister (John La Farge’s wife), he had an emotional moment of tempting efficiency. “I said to myself ‘Now or never is my chance; stay and sail—borrow clothes, borrow a toothbrush, borrow a bunk, borrow $100: you will never be so near it again. The worst is over—the arranging; it’s all arranged for you, with two kind ladies thrown in.’” If only he had a thick enough overcoat! If only there had been an extra bunk! He “turned and fled.”75 Still, he told Clara and Clare Benedict, Fenimore’s sister and niece, who were annual European regulars at Bayreuth, “I want to go as much as ever.” He soon made a tentative arrangement to sail with them to New York in August 1904.
He also put his house in order, as best he could. In early February 1902, he had published a memorial essay for Katherine Bronson, who had died in Venice the previous year. In November 1903, he visited “the infinitely touching and backward-reaching Leslie Stephen” on his deathbed, surrounded by “beautiful ghosts, beautiful living images,” including his daughters, Vanessa and Virginia. “He is so gentle and friendly to me that he almost makes me cry.” He was also leaving behind living friends, one of whom, Jocelyn Persse, a thirty-year-old, handsome, undemanding, well-to-do and well-connected Irishman, with a shock of blond hair and an “enchanted physique,” he had met in mid-1903. Without any talent or intellectual interests of his own, the fashionable Persse was the nephew of Lady Gregory, the cofounder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, who had been born a Persse and whom James had known in London since the early 1890s. “I … envy you … the magnificent ease with which you circulate & revolve,” James told his new friend, “spinning round like a brightly-painted top that emits, as it goes, only the most musical hum.” James admired his youth, his beauty, his amiable self-confidence in the London social world, “the mysterious genial power that guides & sustains you through the multitude of your contacts & the mazes of your dance.” They quickly became close companions, with an exchange of photographs and the promise of intimacy. “There is, for me, something admirable & absolute between us.… But these things are beyond words—words almost vulgarize them. Yet the last ones of your note infinitely move me & I am, my dear Jocelyn, yours ever so tenderly.”76
He had at last met Edith Wharton, who had been pursuing an introduction since 1885 (they had twice been guests at large dinner parties without their being introduced or his even noticing her). She finally became part of his consciousness in December 1903 when they met in London. Their hesitant relationship was to become unequivocal during his American visit. The next May, the Whartons visited him in Rye, motoring down from London, impressing him with their automobile and their mobility. In early August 1904, despite his conviction that he was “destitute of the English mania for letting … & for persuading servants to be let,” he succeeded in renting Lamb House for six months to an acceptable tenant at five pounds a week. He was pleased that the house and the servants, even his “precious” dachshund puppy, Max, his fifth effort at having a reliable, undemanding household companion, were in good hands. When he learned that Howard Sturgis was also sailing to America, he excitedly hoped they might be shipboard companions. Since only the most expensive berths were available, Sturgis declined the extravagance. James consoled himself with the likelihood of seeing him in America, particularly at the Whartons’ Lenox home, where “Mrs. Wharton has held you out to me as a bait… and I have opened my mouth wide.”77
His late August departure rapidly approaching, he felt “pressed & positively ridden & haunted with things to be done & work, above all, to be finished before I sail.… The heat & the crowd & the treacherous depths of the whirlpool” [of London] made him ill. To the Benedicts in Bayreuth, he confirmed, early in July, the irrevocability of his commitment with the news that he had ordered new clothes, bought a steamer trunk, and paid the remainder of his boat fare. From late July, in a miserably torrid summer, he would be at the Reform Club, “watch in hand, timing your approach, reading the weather-prophecies and trying to make a clink in my pocket of my few remaining shillings.” He had hoped that Andersen would visit Lamb House before he sailed. Instead, he was to discover, he would have the opportunity to see his young friend in America, at Newport. By late July, he was, he told Ariana Curtis, “pretending hard now, not to be afraid.” He had a whole ghostly world of American friends and family, some of whom he had not seen for decades, whose embrace he both yearned for and feared. “I spend the most of September with Wm & Alice at Chocorua.… But California is my desired goal.” Though he still had “350 things to do” before embarking, he could almost taste his impending victory over his fears, his resistances, the sheer number of details he had had to confront. Friends came to say good-bye. He wrote farewell notes to those already behind him, anticipatory notes to those to come. The weather became a little cooler. On August 24, 1904, at sixty-one years of age, with Constance Woolson’s sister and niece, he sailed from Southampton on the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm II, which expected to make the summer crossing to New York in a record five days. Now “bald and grizzled, this perfect American,” a description of an American traveler in Europe in one of his early stories, was returning to the New World.78