1875
FOR OVER A MONTH MOTHER HAD BEEN PREDICTING THAT Harry would come home soon, and this time her maternal antennae did not fail her. In early October a steamer docked and out walked an older, confident, handsome, sun-bronzed Harry.
I was content just to gaze upon my second brother and take in his stories while Mother and Aunt Kate fluttered around, ordering the cook to make his favorite dishes, going through his clothes and sewing on buttons, asking concerned questions about his health and the quality of the air in his room. He was a stranger now—almost. Formerly shy and tongue-tied, he was displaying a new talent as a raconteur, his youthful stammer concealed behind thoughtful measured pauses. He was invited to no end of teas and dinners, at which people listened reverently to his tales of life at the Palazzo Barberini, where William Wetmore Storey, a sculptor from Boston, was installed, along with his wife and a band of bohemian artists. To hear Harry tell it, it was an Old World paradise of liveried servants, cavernous fifteenth-century halls, every alcove bristling with neoclassical Venuses and Pans.
“Is he still doing sibyls?” Clover Adams asked. “When we were there, there were sibyls on all sides. Sibyls sitting, sibyls standing, sibyls with legs crossed, with legs uncrossed. You’ve never seen so many sibyls in your life!” Harry admitted that there were probably more sibyls than the world required. Now that Europe had polished and finished him, the Adamses craved his society more than ever and persisted in trying to persuade him to “come home” for good. Father took Harry as his guest to the Saturday Club, and although he was polite, he did not seem genuinely enthusiastic about the Boston cognoscenti. Mother confided to me, “I trust he will feel more and more that it is much better to live near his family and with his own countrymen, than to lead the recluse life he led abroad.”
Recluse life? Was she daft? What about the glamorous palazzo, the liveried servants, the expatriate artists, the beautiful and idle women who went riding with Harry in the Roman campagna? After a month and a half, you could see that Cambridge society was already wearing thin for him. Though he tried to mask his feelings, I noted a number of dismissive remarks about the “flimsiness” of American vegetation, the “aridity” of Yankee social life, and the strangeness of a country where men talked only of business and women ruled over the arts. And American hostesses had no respect for one’s work, according to him. To be in Harry’s company was to be made excruciatingly aware of everything America lacked: great art, an established leisure class, stately homes, proper piazzas with proper fountains, well-trained servants, literary salons, ladies with repose, civilized clubs for gentlemen.
At Shady Hill he was apt to fall into arcane Ruskinian discussions with the Nortons, peppered with words like campanile and loggia. One evening, I overheard him telling Grace that he felt it was his duty to “attempt to live at home before I grow older”—as if it were a penance. Later he murmured over his after-dinner brandy, “Europe is fading away into a pleasant dream. I mean to keep a firm grip on the Old World in some way or other.” He now seemed more comfortable at Shady Hill than anywhere else.
He was becoming as mysterious as Father, who had the habit, shared by none of the other fathers we knew, of going off on mysterious trips and coming back a week or two later. William had inherited this proclivity for sudden impulsive journeys to change the weather in his head, and it occurred to me now that Harry resembled Father in the way he parceled himself out. Many people had a piece of him, I thought, but no one, including me, had the whole story.
“We are a disappointment to him, I think,” I whispered to Sara one warm evening on the piazza at Shady Hill. “We don’t even speak Italian.” Sara had been making comic faces at me behind her hand every time the word Ruskin issued from Charles’s mouth. He was in full didactic mode (“It is always to be remembered that . . .” “It will be found on observation that. . .”) and Father was looking quite dyspeptic. It was asserted by someone that Ruskin was the first to interpret the decline of art and taste as the sign of a general cultural crisis. Harry noted that people’s ideas of sky were derived from pictures more than reality. Grace said that the relationship of art, morality, and social justice formed a “holy trinity.” What on earth did she mean?
“Speaking of matters Italian, Alice,” Sara whispered into my ear. Her breath smelled pleasantly of wine. “I wish you could have seen old Grace batting her eyes at the Italian professor the other night. Oh, the stories I could tell.” Sara had by now passed out of the phase of being charitable about her out-laws.
“Please do describe all her dissolute pruderies to me.”
“Later. Old Mrs. Norton is giving us the evil eye. Oh, look at poor Theo, trying to get on her good side.” I glanced over at Theodora Sedgwick, picking at her food in a nervous, rabbity manner, a smile frozen on her face, nodding compulsively at Mrs. Norton.
“It won’t do any good,” Sara continued. “Mrs. Norton has ordered Charles not to take on a new wife, at least until all the children are grown, and he would never dream of disobeying her. This is strictly entre nous, of course.”
She moved her chair closer to mine and, gazing levelly into my eyes, caught a stray strand of my hair and tucked it tenderly behind my ear. In the guise of hair maintenance, she managed to stroke my cheek and neck briefly with her fingertips. Then she rested her bare arm on the back of my chair, brushing against my bare shoulders. What was this? Just being chums?
After dark at the Nortons, we younger women habitually kicked off our evening slippers under the table and put these instruments of torture back on only as we were leaving. Now, as Grace launched into a pointless anecdote about dining in London with Elizabeth Gaskell (for whom young Lily—Elizabeth Gaskell Norton—was named), I felt Sara’s stockinged foot on mine, first as the lightest of caresses, like moth wings against the skin. A faint smile played at the corners of her lips. Inching her toes slowly down toward mine, she massaged my foot in a way that made me catch my breath, and then she was working her way slowly back up to my ankle. You had to hand it to her; Sara could do more with her toes than most people with their fingers. In every cell of my body I felt myself open helplessly to her touch, and knew at that moment I would have sold out my own mother for an hour in Sara’s arms.
But we had put that behind us. I stared down at my hands gripping my sherry glass, trying not to smile.
Despite his Italian inclinations, Harry evidently took to heart his professed goal of seeking his literary material in America. By December he’d decided to try living in New York, where he could be near his editors, mingle with other men of letters, and support himself with reviews and journalism.
“Do you think you’ll be happy there, Harry?” I asked him. I’d recently made a couple of trips to New York City myself, but to actually live in New York, as Harry was about to, was a pipe-dream for me.
“I have no plans of liking or disliking, of being happy or the reverse,” he said. “I shall take what comes, make the best of it, and dream inveterately.”
Who was this new stoical Harry who behaved as if there was something he must renounce in order to live in America? The week before, at a dinner party at the Howells, I’d found him surrounded by a crowd of girls. One girl, flirting aggressively, kept trying to pin him down on whether he would attend her tea next Thursday. When he said he must write that day, she teased him, saying she’d heard he was a “woman hater”—was it true? I saw Harry recoil, becoming frosty and remote. This was someone I was meeting for the first time.
HENRY JAMES
25TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY
MARCH 4TH 1875
TO WILLIAM JAMES
I am sorry to report that life here is dull and unrelenting. Mornings I work on Roderick Hudson. What a treadmill to be serialized in the Atlantic! I am subject to nightmares in which the magazine comes out with blank pages where RH should be, covering me with shame. The monthly payments are not enough to live on here, so my afternoons are devoted to writing reviews and critical notes on books which are uniformly bad & which I skim. Journalism—bah!
You were right all along. I probably am ruined for America but I shall keep trying. Don’t breathe a word of this to M & F—or A.
HENRY JAMES
25TH ST., NYC,
APRIL 1ST, ’75
TO MISS GRACE NORTON
Before I came here. I didn’t realize how wedded I was to life in Italy, and what I wouldn’t give now for the sight of a proper piazza with a proper fountain! Instead, there is the el spewing coal and live embers onto the street, the hideous brown-stones with their lumpen balustrades, the ceaseless ugly grind of commerce. For literary material there are only two sources here: (1) the brash world of high finance (where I have no entrée even were I inclined to write about stockbrokers) & (2) the hothouse social circuit of the hostesses in their Fifth Avenue mansions. That milieu I could penetrate if I felt the urge, but I don’t somehow. Culture is entirely in the hands of women here. The men are all too busy making money. I’m told they work like dogs, all the time; there is no leisure class here apparently. I sometimes meet your brother-in-law Arthur Sedgwick at a little bohemian chop-house near the Nation’s offices in Beekman Place. He seems to be getting on well as a journalist.
JOURNAL OF HENRY JAMES—NYC, APRIL 15, 1875
I’ve told no one here it is my birthday. It is late & I ought to try to sleep on my lumpy bed, but the air is like the steam from a cauldron & I must set down my impressions of tonight. (This journal entry will go directly on the pyre when I am on my deathbed.) Despite my better judgment I met Arthur S. after work at our usual chop-house; as soon as I arrived I saw that he was already drunk. He had no idea it was my birthday. He wanted to discuss Boston. There was nothing I wanted to discuss less; in large part I moved to New York to avoid talking or thinking about Boston.
“I don’t miss Cambridge much, do you? Or Boston,” he said, exhaling twin streams of smoke through his nostrils. “By the way, Harry, how is that very serious sister of yours?”
“Quite well, although I don’t know that I’d call Alice serious. We think of her as rather the wit of the family.”
“Well, she always looks so serious.” He poured himself another glass of port and tossed back a few swallows while I wondered what he was getting at. Then he drawled, “Harry, would you say our sisters are old maids? At what age does one cross that threshold? I ask because you write so much about women. You seem to read their minds. What do you think?”
I sensed that he was being disingenuous and said, “Oh, I believe Alice, Sara, and Theodora are still relatively young maids.”
“You know, a couple of years ago I thought Charles would become my brother-in-law for a second time. At that time it was Sara he wanted.”
“I vaguely recall hearing something of the sort. Evidently it didn’t happen.”
“No, but poor Sara had a terrible time. Whenever she was hanging laundry on the line she’d feel him watching her broodingly from the piazza. When he talked to her, his eyes would stray to her bosom. One day she was on the floor playing jacks with the children, and Charles sat down next to her, feigning interest in the game. At one point she leaned forward from her knees to gather up the jacks and felt his hand graze her bottom, so lightly it was almost deniable. After that, she fled to New York, leaving the field to the more receptive Theodora. Haven’t you seen Theo going around with her secret little grin, quoting Charles’s opinions everywhere? When you run across them in the woods, she is always buttoning her blouse, Charles fumbling with his trousers. It is quite comical, really.”
I sat there stone-faced, hoping that Arthur’s confiding mood would pass. Clamping my forearm with his hand, he began to whisper urgently, “I have never told anyone this, Harry, but you are a man of the world. Some years ago, I came back to Kirkland Street late at night. It was during a heat wave and I happened to glance out at the back garden, and, by Jove, there were Sara and Alice without a stitch on. They were standing in the moonlight with their arms around each other and their hair falling down, like nymphs on a Grecian amphora.”
He was still clutching my forearm, bringing his face so close that I could make out a sliver of meat caught between two incisors.
“Oh, well, women are affectionate with one another. It signifies nothing,” I said, hoping to staunch the flow. By now, I was yearning for my forlorn apartment on 25th St. and the dreadful novels I was supposed to review. I hoped (and thought it probable) that Arthur would recall nothing of this conversation tomorrow morning.
“I suppose”—Arthur was speaking thickly now—“there are old maids and then there are old maids.” His face brightened and he wagged his index finger playfully at me. “Now that’s what you should write about, Harry-boy—the Boston Marriage.”
“Perhaps you should do it,” I said in my coldest tone as I counted out the change in my palm.
Curiously, however much I was revolted by Arthur’s indelicate harangue, there was a brief spark in my brain that told me that someday I may in fact “do” the Boston Marriage.
ALICE JAMES
20 QUINCY ST., CAMBRIDGE
MAY 23RD, 1876
TO MISS NANNY ASHBURNER
I am with Miss Katherine Loring & have charge of the historical young women. I think I shall enjoy it & I know it will do me lots of good. Don’t you want to become one of my students? I will write you the wisest of letters about any period of the world you choose. You can laugh and think me as much of a humbug as you choose, you can’t do so more than I have myself . . .
P.S. We who have had all our lives, more books than we know what do with can’t conceive of the feeling that people have for them who have been shut out from them always. They look upon them as something sacred apparently & some of the letters I get are most touching.