12.

STRANIERI

IN 1786 A German poet traveling alone and under an assumed name boarded a coach in the spa town of Carlsbad and set off for the south on a holiday from the growing burden of his own fame. He ate his first figs in Munich, and once he had crossed the Brenner Pass and begun his descent into Italy, he exulted in a basket of peaches and pears. Venice seduced him but what he really wanted was Rome, and when he left the Adriatic behind, he pushed on so quickly for the papal city that he passed through Florence itself in a single night. Rome was the goal, for Goethe no less than for any other northerner on the Grand Tour, Rome and its remains, Rome and his hopes that the city might enlarge his very soul. So it will prove for Isabel Archer. She enjoys her weeks in Florence, but she too wants something more, and she will eventually make her home in the ancient capital.

Still, her first visit is a short one—just ten days at the end of May. She travels down from Florence with Ralph and Henrietta and they take rooms at the Hôtel de Paris. James himself usually stayed at the much larger Roma, in the Corso, which was especially recommended for “passing travellers or bachelors.” But he put his characters exactly where one would have found their real-life equivalents, just a few steps away from the Piazza di Spagna, in the center of what was called the city’s “strangers’ quarter.” The Baedeker for 1879 lists an Albergo di Parigi in the via San Sebastianello, a steep and narrow little street that runs parallel to the Spanish Steps, climbing up toward the Pincio, the hanging gardens where Daisy Miller had scandalized her world by strolling unchaperoned with an Italian. Keats had died just around the corner, in a house near the foot of the Steps, and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch had spent her unhappy honeymoon close by in the via Sistina, which runs from their top down to Piazza Barberini. And today it remains a district of stranieri still, as anyone who has had to sidle around the crowds on those stairs will know.

In James’s day as in ours, the neighborhood was crowded with hotels, most of them with similarly generic names—the Russia, the Europa, the Inghilterra. Among them the only thing that distinguishes Isabel’s is the fact that it billed itself as suitable for families; an unostentatious choice for someone still getting used to her money. A few years later the Hôtel de Paris appears to have moved, while staying well within the quarter. My 1886 Baedeker gives an address on via San Nicola di Tolentino, a street in which many foreign artists kept their studios; advertisements note that it had one of the city’s first elevators. In that later spot it faced the Palazzo Barberini, where the sculptor William Wetmore Story rented an apartment of some fifty rooms, an apartment that functioned as the unofficial capital of the American colony in Rome and in which James himself spent many evenings.

In Florence, Osmond had told Isabel that he would like to see her in Rome, to watch her take it in, and soon enough he will follow her down. She will have another encounter before he does, however, and one that says more about the Anglo-American experience of the city. One afternoon she goes to the Forum, and when Ralph strolls off with a guide, she sits down on a fallen column. Scenery in this novel is never inert, never just a block of description. James always uses it to serve some dramatic purpose, to tell us something about his characters’ perceptions or desires. He has already suggested that though Isabel does feel the burden of Rome’s past, she also finds the city full of “the fresh, cool breath of the future.” Even the tumbled walls of the Forum make her think of nothing so much as her own prospects, and she’s so lost in her thoughts of the life to come that she doesn’t hear an approaching footstep, looking up only when a shadow falls across her line of vision.

The shadow belongs to Lord Warburton, and their meeting is accidental. He himself has been in Turkey and has stopped off in Rome on his way back home. In reading one certainly feels that the novelist is busily plotting; this way of bringing an old suitor onto the stage looks, at first, like coincidence on a Dickensian scale. Yet we shouldn’t allow it to strain our credulity. In an 1860 letter Henry Adams writes of going to the Vatican and running into “a young lady whom I used to know at Dresden,” while the letters his wife Clover sent from Italy are full of her chance encounters with other Bostonians. Warburton tells Isabel that he is merely passing through, but that doesn’t mean he’ll treat it “as if it were Clapham Junction. To pass through Rome is to stop for a week or two.” Clapham Junction was and is a South London railroad station, and even now remains the busiest commuter interchange in Britain. For people in Isabel’s world, however, Rome itself was a kind of Clapham Junction. It provided a major switching point on the routes of Victorian tourism, and in 1873 James wrote in a letter that “I have first or last seen in a cab in the Corso every one I ever saw anywhere before.”

Warburton’s entrance will have its effect on the plot, but it also has an effect on the reader today that’s summed up by a line in the journals of John Cheever. The Forum now looks, Cheever wrote, as if it were “a double ruin: a ruin of antiquity and a monument to the tender sentiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers, for we see not only the ghosts of the Romans here but the shades of ladies with parasols and . . . little children rolling hoops.” Any experience of Rome is a layered one, with cars honking outside a church built atop a temple, but such things now also lie under a topsoil of Anglo-American perception, and all of Italy comes to us as filtered through our awareness of earlier travelers. We remember what James said, or Twain; we register the difference between their version of the Caesars and ours, and pat ourselves on the back for knowing more than Hawthorne, who described the church of San Luigi dei Francesi without noticing the Caravaggios. Tastes shift, and desires as well, and the chronicle of touristic appreciation stands itself as a part of the city’s meaning and a measure too of America’s ever-changing relations with Europe. We join our own perceptions up with our predecessors’, and so place ourselves in history. We assert a sense of continuity; we give ourselves a past.

James delighted in what he called the “palpable imaginable visitable past—in the nearer distances” of a recently departed era. Such a period seemed close enough to reach, as by the long stretch of a mental arm, and for Cheever—for me—one face of that past now belongs to James himself. But the ghosts he usually saw were those of people still present, and in Rome he reserved a special fascination for the earlier lives of his expatriated elders, the lives they had led just before his own arrival. They were the relicts of the city he called old Rome: a quiet town, and underpopulated, a place in which the pope was both the secular and the spiritual ruler, and where all modern opinion was censored. James had known that city for just a few months at the end of 1869, on his own first excited visit, and could never quite shed his sense of it. But the next year the Papal States were annexed by the new kingdom of Italy, and by the time he returned, in the winter of 1872–73, the city seemed to him to have lost a part of its color and style. The pope’s carriage no longer passed in the street; old Rome had vanished just when he got there, a fact that only increased his own sense of belatedness. America was a young nation, but even among other Americans he had come too late.

In 1903, James published one of his most curious books, a two-volume biography, in the accepted life-and-letters mode, called William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Its subject was the Salem-born son of a Supreme Court justice, and a bit of a prodigy; a man who in his twenties had produced treatises on contracts and personal property. But the law bored him. Story liked poetry more, and was also interested in the visual arts, an interest confirmed by his first visit to Italy in 1847. A decade later he took his family abroad for good. Money went far in Rome, and Story had plenty of it; his place in the Barberini seemed cheap. It was on an upper floor of a sprawling seventeenth-century palace, a building that made James meditate on “what the grand style for the few involved in the way of a small style for the many.” The owners had kept the best rooms for themselves, including the one with the Cortona ceiling that celebrated Urban VIII, the family’s pope, and James sometimes caught a glimpse of history as he climbed the stairs to his American friends: the sight of the old Cardinal Barberini himself playing cards with his priests, whose resigned smiles announced that they had, once more, managed to let His Eminence win.

Story’s smoothly classicizing sculpture has little interest for us now, but it was famous in its time; a fame helped by his friendship with Hawthorne, who described some of it in The Marble Faun. By the time James knew him, however, the sculptor’s best work all lay in the past. He had settled into life as a host, and though the novelist admitted in an 1873 letter that the man’s “cleverness” was great, he added that “the world’s good nature to him is greater.” James liked some of Story’s travel sketches, but he thought the rest of it—the poetry and the marbles alike—nothing more than the work of a charming amateur. So he hesitated when, after his 1895 death, Story’s family asked him to do the biography; accepting only because he needed the advance to furnish Lamb House. Still, James kept putting it off, believing that the materials were too thin, that neither the man’s life nor his work contained enough to fill the project out. The money had been spent, though, and when he finally began, he discovered that he did have the makings of a book: not a biography per se, but a portrait of Story’s generation, in which the narrative is carried by the letters the sculptor had written to and received from larger figures.

In that excursion into the visitable past Story appears as one of James’s own “precursors”: those Americans who went to Europe when the going was not yet easy. Writing in an age when America had become one of the world’s Great Powers, James found himself fascinated by his nation’s early but ever-growing “consciousness of the complicated world it was so persistently to annex.” He himself belonged to a generation that had gone well supplied with guidebooks and photographs and letters of introduction. His elders had had no such luxuries, and especially the artists among them. They had had no one to tell them what and where and how to study, and James recognized that his own easy cosmopolitanism depended on the fact that his predecessors had cut the road before him. He knew that Story’s or even Hawthorne’s understanding of Europe appeared quaint in comparison to that of his own era; the era as well of Sargent and Whistler, no longer the Old World’s students, but counted among its masters. Nevertheless, he saw them with a filial piety, for those precursors included not only Story, or his parents, but also his own earliest characters. They had made his world, his fiction—had made him—possible.

In Italy the Americans and the English often formed a single community, and James couldn’t resist noting that during the fall of 1849 Elizabeth Barrett Browning read Jane Eyre in a copy she had borrowed from the Storys. But such homespun details should make us pause. The picture James’s fiction gives us of expatriate life has become so emblematic a part of our culture that we need to ask just how many people lived and moved in the world he described. Or rather how few. The 1872 Murray’s Handbook of Rome notes that in 1870 there were just 457 permanently resident Protestants in a city where the total population approached 250,000; given Italy’s own religious homogeneity, the term functions as a proxy for “foreign.” The Italian census for 1871 offers a rather different figure, however, and puts the number of Protestants at 3,798. The historian John Pemble explains the discrepancy as reflecting, first, a sharp increase in the scale of both business and diplomacy after Rome became the capital of the united Italy; and second, the possible inclusion in that figure of the temporary population in hotels and lodgings. The latter suggestion seems confirmed by the travel writer Bayard Taylor, who wrote in March 1868 that there were then 1,200 Americans in the city; most of them left immediately after Easter. Such transients were Rome’s equivalent of summer—that is, winter—people, those who came for the “season,” as James himself did in 1872–73. But the fixed population remained small. An 1894 survey of “Americans Abroad” in Lippincott’s notes that while Rome then received 30,000 of James’s countrymen as visitors each year, there were still just 200 permanent American inhabitants. Paris had 2,500.

That number would, however, have included many people who did not figure in James’s world. The young seminarians from the Vatican’s new American College were not likely to appear at the Storys’ Sunday evening at-homes. Nor were the city’s English tradesmen, to whom Murray and Baedeker provide something like a gazetteer. A Mr. Shea arranged the lease of furnished apartments from his office in the Piazza di Spagna, and was also recommended as a trustworthy agent for those wishing to ship luggage or artwork to England and America. A “depot of London saddlery” could be found at Barfoot’s in the via del Babuino, and G. Baker owned a pharmacy. There were no English booksellers as such, but the German-run Spithöver’s stocked English publications and got the newspapers too. An erstwhile drawing master named Arthur Strutt had become a noted distributor of Italian wines, and the eponymous Ice Company made its wares from “Trevi water.” A Miss Black is listed in Murray’s as a “daily governess,” an American dentist practiced in the via Nazionale, and a man called Jarrett kept a livery stable in the Piazza del Popolo. Thomas Cook had its office in the Piazza di Spagna, and an English company ran the city’s gasworks from a plant at the Circus Maximus.

These businesses allowed visitors, or indeed the city’s resident Anglophones, to arrange their lives without the need to know Italian or even any Italians. And certainly those tourists were needed to fill the Church of England Chapel, which seated 800; the American Episcopal church was even bigger. But the Storys’ tea-parties would in any case have drawn upon a different population. Murray recommended three English doctors and one American. There were several English bankers, though James himself used the Italian house of Spada, Flamini. There were the embassies, and above all there were artists. The 1872 edition of Murray’s lists 36 studios run by American or English sculptors and painters, while noting that the roster includes only established figures—not students, not beginners. Few of them have a reputation today. The real talent had begun to go instead to Paris, where one could study the painting of modern life, and of the permanent residents the most interesting was the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, a friend of Hawthorne’s whom James described as looking like a “remarkably ugly little grey-haired boy.” Her work has more tactile play than Story’s; and she had also helped import a pack of hounds for the newly established Roman hunt.

The smaller Roman world-within-a-world in which James moved and of which he wrote contained just a few hundred people. I count some fifty names in the letters he sent to Cambridge in the winter and spring of 1873, and many of them belong to fellow transients. The Bootts fell into this category, down for the winter from Florence. So did a new friend, Sara Butler Wister, from Philadelphia. She was the daughter of the English actress Fanny Kemble, at whose London fireside James would later sit, and the mother of Owen Wister, the future author of The Virginian (1902). James admired her beautiful hair, but insisted to Quincy Street that he didn’t “at all regret that I’m not Dr. Wister.” He had other meetings with old friends and acquaintances who were, like Lord Warburton, simply passing through. Early in March he met up with a rather feeble Ralph Waldo Emerson; a few weeks later he saw the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Henry Adams on their way back from an Egyptian honeymoon. But such encounters were just hometown gossip, and James wrote to William that though he supposed Rome was full of interesting people, “I doubt that there is any very edifying society.”

Nevertheless, he decided in these months to surrender himself to the entanglements of expatriate life. He complained about it, but he put his work on hold in order to absorb the sights and sounds of this rarefied milieu. He went to three weekly receptions, he lunched and dined and called, and in the floating world of the Roman spring this spare man soon found himself “in the position of a creature with five women offering to ride with him.” His companions on horseback included both Mrs. Wister and Alice Mason, the divorced wife of the Massachusetts politican Charles Sumner; but his favorite companion remained Lizzie Boott. With such a routine it is perhaps no wonder that the emphasis of his Italian fiction would soon begin to change. Most nineteenth-century American novels about Italy—The Marble Faun, James’s own Roderick Hudson, to some degree Howells’s Indian Summer—devoted themselves to the lives of artists, providing a sanitized version of la vie bohème in which the pursuit of culture is entirely compatible with bourgeois propriety. As such, they offered a conventional account of what their authors believed their countrymen wanted from the Old World. One of the things that separates The Portrait of a Lady from those books is its indifference to the world of the studios. Its representative American in Rome is Madame Merle, who keeps a smart third-floor pied-à-terre, not Hawthorne’s Puritan painter Hilda, with her home in an airy tower. James wrote to his brother that he hoped his winter of relentless socializing had given him “more impressions” than it seemed, and one of the things he got, which now makes Roderick Hudson look dated, was the sense that America’s Italy was no longer what it had been in his precursors’ age. It was no longer the site of artistic devotion, but had instead become a fashionable playground, a stopping point for an international society that moved from place to place and crossed the oceans with the seasons. If Gilbert Osmond were real, he would in his younger days have known such American artists as Story or Hiram Powers; he would have shared his side of the Arno with the Brownings. But not a trace of that appears in Isabel’s world, a world that contains nobody remotely like James himself.

James wrote to Quincy Street in January that the American society he found in Rome seemed “without relations with the place, or much serious appreciation of it.” To say that, however, is to beg the question of James’s own relations with the place, and indeed with Europe itself. After he read the Story biography, Henry Adams told him that the book had exposed the ignorance of the world from which they both came, making him “curl up, like a trodden-on worm. Improvised Europeans, we were, and—Lord God!—How thin.” Adams took some consolation in the thought that almost nobody would recognize the truth, but James’s own characters had said similar things. The historian’s phrases, however pungent, are simply a version of the standard complaint about “cosmopolites”—the usual thing said about them, said even or especially by themselves. As Ellen Olenska in Wharton’s Age of Innocence would later argue, “It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.”

Of course, Adams’s claim also points to a great paradox. His generation had gone to Europe in search of what they couldn’t find at home, and yet in doing so they were also making a past, a heritage, for us; and at the turn of the twentieth century the intellectual life of Boston and Cambridge, which improvised upon that European legacy, was richer than that of Rome itself. As James himself knew. He knew that America would control the future by annexing the past. It would make its culture by exploiting its freedom to choose, to draw upon the heritage of different lands and centuries, taking a painting here and a philosophy there. Such, at any rate, is the burden of his last great novel, The Golden Bowl, which among other things explores the classical motif of the translatio studii et imperii, the movement of learning and power from one civilization to another.

Still, the Europe that draws that novel’s ironically named art collector, Adam Verver, isn’t that of the present day. He buys old things, not new; that was what America wanted, what it both lacked and desired. James recognized that his countrymen’s fascination with the past made them ignore Italy’s own preoccupation “with its economical and political future,” and yet he too resisted seeing it as a modern state. Some English expatriates, like the Brownings, had identified themselves with the Risorgimento. Most Americans abroad did not, and modernity was precisely what they had come to escape. James came to speak good Italian and to read it with some ease, but he had few Italian friends, and though he had once thought of settling in Italy, his season in Rome persuaded him otherwise. Those months taught him that it was hard to write about a picturesque subject in a picturesque country. The city gave too much. The most intelligent conversation seemed unable to compete with the spectacle of its streets, and James wondered if even so limited an artist as Story might have worked with a “finer rage” in the unfriendlier air of Boston or London. He himself would write better of Italy—would have deeper imaginative relations to it—for not being there, and the most interesting question raised by his January letter to Quincy Street isn’t about any particular place, about Rome or even all of Italy. It is instead the question of the place in his work of place itself.

During her first days in Rome, Isabel finds that the city seems to speak of her own future, and she will later see it as embodying her own psychic state: a place in which people have suffered, and in which “the ruins of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe.” Such passages should make us ask if Europe ever stands for James as something more or other than a backdrop against which the dramas of his American characters might play. In what way is it integral, and in what mere scenery? One of the things that fascinated him about Hawthorne was what he called the “imported” nature of his sense of sin. Hawthorne certainly knew the world of his Puritan ancestors, but to James he didn’t appear haunted by it. His relation to its almost mystical darkness was an intellectual rather than a moral one, and to James he seemed but to play with its shadows. On this reading, sin becomes an aspect of the picturesque, and indeed James’s language takes on a geographic tinge; he speaks of the “rugged prominence of moral responsibility.” Sin is atmosphere, it is contour and relief. It intensifies the drama, just as Isabel’s sense of her own sadness gains from her awareness of the ever-present Roman past.

Let’s say, then, that James uses Europe in the way he thinks Hawthorne does sin—as color or background, a way to ratchet up the stakes, but not as a part of his work’s deepest being. Yet that claim in itself begs a central question about America’s relation to the rest of the world. In many ways Europe provides as fresh a start for James’s characters as it did for their creator. It lets them appear as though cut off from their pasts. Madame Merle’s native Brooklyn no longer appears to matter, nor Osmond’s Baltimore, and even Isabel’s more significant antecedents dwindle by the page. But in stepping out of America she doesn’t quite step into Europe either, and the bubble life of the expatriate becomes as one with her belief in her own exceptional fate. Her very disconnection from the world around her reinforces her claim that “nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me,” and the American girl’s Europe becomes a place in which one can explore the limits of the self in itself, unbound by the fetters of national origin. It stands as a paradox, offering liberty and history at once; a place in which one’s exemption from history seems to provide a warrant for that liberty. But James’s own Europe is very different from that of his characters, and never more central than when it seems mere background, than when it fosters the illusion of freedom on which Isabel depends.

James drew on his Roman winter for years to come; it gave him both Roderick Hudson and the later chapters of the Portrait along with a number of short stories. Its most immediate results, however, were the two travel essays he published in the summer of 1873. “A Roman Holiday” purports to offer an account of the annual pre-Lenten Carnival, an event that provides a set piece in almost all touristic descriptions of the city. It is there in Goethe, in Dickens, in Hawthorne—and what’s also there in each of them is an almost ritual sense of disappointment. This sorry show is the Carnival, this tired display of masks and confetti and forced hilarity? The festival began that year on the fifteenth of February. It was a Saturday, and James was at his desk in the Hôtel de Rome when a sudden intensification of noise pulled him to his window. He had formed his own idea of Carnival from a children’s book that featured an elegant masked lady on a balcony, but the ladies on the balconies now were all shoveling lime and flour down on to the heads of the pedestrians below, and when he went out himself, James immediately got a pailful dumped upon him. Nothing in this “dingy drollery” could match his childhood fantasies, but once he had shaken the flour from his ears, he had a vision of just how empty the rest of the city must be. So he took a holiday from the holiday, wandering away from the festival’s compulsory pleasures and out to the Forum and Santa Maria Maggiore—familiar places, but made fresh by his own sense of escape.

The essay’s most suggestive passage describes a church James doesn’t even name, though he offers precise directions as to how to find it. A little road cuts up the Palatine, running like a country lane between high walls, and then rounds a bend to a pocket-sized, barrel-vaulted church; any good map will give its name as San Bonaventura. Just five minutes’ walk—but it’s still enough, even now, for the city’s bustle to fade out. The church remains so untouristed as to seem forgotten, and on the day I visited, there was only one other person inside, a man sitting in prayer before the high altar. I circled around behind him, walking as softly as I could and trying to make out the paintings on the walls—Caravaggio knockoffs, but so darkened by candle smoke that I couldn’t really see them. On the day James discovered it, he too had found just a solitary worshiper. A young priest was visiting each of the church’s seven altars in turn, and the novelist thought he could hear in the silence the distant bustle of the Carnival itself. The young man’s pale face looked like a judgment on that merriment, and yet his piety came with privations so great that to the writer it appeared “a terrible game—a gaining one only if your zeal never falters; a hard fight when it does.” The language James uses here is so charged with both the sense of his own vocation and a knowledge of its price that it makes the priest seem a kind of stand-in, a figure on whom he can place the burden of his own choice. “I made no vows,” Wordsworth writes in The Prelude as he remembers the moment of his dedication to poetry, “but vows were then made for me,” and James here makes an altar of words before which to renew his own pledge.

A few weeks later he hired one of Mr. Jarrett’s horses in the hope that riding would give him some much-needed exercise, and wrote to Quincy Street of his pleasure in keeping a “close seat.” He would leave the city from the Porta del Popolo, heading out across the Campagna, and though he usually rode in company, he depicts himself in “Roman Rides” as traveling alone. The essay stands as his most deliberate attempt to create a picturesque landscape. The remnants of the Claudian Aqueduct along which he rode spoke more of Claude Lorrain than they did of the emperor who built it, and its ruins felt to him as though they were themselves “the very source of the solitude in which they stand . . . [looming] with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands.” Such an image belongs to the mind as much as it does to the ground itself, the mind that produces the scenes it expects to find. James did indeed see the Campagna as landscape, not land, looking for the accustomed bits of broken column or a shepherd in the foreground, and his readers will once again think of the Romantics. Only not Wordsworth this time, but rather the Coleridge of “Kubla Khan” and the Shelley of “Ozymandias.”

In Rome every moment chimes against the past, every moment has its echo, and in riding over the countryside, James knew that he was riding through history as well, as though space and time could be plotted with the same coordinates. Every step spoke of an “unbroken continuity,” and he found a paradoxical freedom in the humbling fact that everything he saw had already “suited some one else.” He couldn’t flatter himself that he had discovered it. Goethe had found in Rome a sense of the everlasting. The city outfaced any change of fashion, and the poet used it to underwrite his own claim to permanence. And what James took from the Eternal City was a national variation on that truth. Rome taught him that freedom depends upon accepting the bonds of history. These places have all been named before. As an American, he may be a new man but he isn’t an Adam, and what Europe offered was the chance to decline the burdens of the American condition. It allowed him to declare himself free of the need to make all things new, to strive and struggle in pursuit of some manifest destiny. “Roman Rides” attempts to define the relation between the modern self and the past, the American mind and the past. It is a more profound piece of writing than any of its author’s early fiction.