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...it is wary of elastic speculation while being every bit as nimble, alert, and far-ranging as it ought to be if justice is to be done to Henry James. I could have used more vivisection—the laying bare of individual sentences, and the probing of syntactical tissue—but no one could deny how densely the author is steeped in his theme. When, on the first page, he writes of James, “He had lived in Europe for thirty years—he had taken possession of it, inhaled it, appropriated it,” he is himself appropriating a line from a letter that James wrote to his family from London, in November, 1875, the day after docking in Liverpool: “I take possession of the old world—I inhale it—I appropriate it!” Gorra does not own up to that borrowing in the endnotes, which is a little remiss, and, as a rule, it seems risky to replay as reported fact, long after the event, what a young man once announced and prophesied on his own behalf. Nonetheless, the accent of devotion is unmistakable, and, if anything, one is driven to ask: Is this book mad enough? Does it have a touch of “that tonic wildness” which Isabel finds wanting in the oversophisticated Madame Merle? If you love a book so much that the sole outlet for your infatuation is to write your own book about it, should you leave rough traces of that love, or should scholarship smooth them over?
In the acknowledgments, at the back of “Portrait of a Novel,” Gorra writes, “I first read ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ during the fall of 1977, in a class at Amherst College.” If I find myself wishing that he had broken cover, perhaps in an afterword, and sought to track his changing apprehension of the novel, over thirty-five years, that is not out of prurience but because such transformation is an abiding theme in James. His books are drenched in time: the times at which they were written, and the times and ways in which they were rewritten or left alone; the times in which they are set; the times that elapse in the careers of the characters, as they thrive or sour; the time it takes for a man to split into two, like the hero of “The Jolly Corner,” and to see what he might have become; and, last, the times at which we read them, and, if we happen to be incurable Jamesians, at which they leave us other than we were. I know of no more enviable diary entry than the one made by Evelyn Waugh on Sunday, November 17, 1946: “Patrick left on Saturday afternoon. What an enormous, uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age and to turn, as the door shuts behind the departing guest, to a first reading of ‘Portrait of a Lady.’ ”
On the other hand, what does middle age bring to the inhabitants of the book? Disappointments, refusals, and shutdowns; chances for the enactment of low cunning, if you are Osmond or Madame Merle; and, for Ralph, what Philip Larkin called “the only end of age.” “The Portrait of a Lady” that I read in my late teens bears the scantest relation to “The Portrait of a Lady” that I read today. That may be because, taking things the wrong way around, I began with the New York edition, whose style bears the more velvety nap, whereas these days, if possible, I pick the earlier version, which is marked by abrasive edges; but textual difference alone does not account for the chasm between the two. What I browsed, back then, seemed a serene, rather aristocratic affair, strewn with bright, overtalkative folk who could switch countries at will; one bad marriage didn’t make it any the less romantic. What I discover now feels funnier, still sharp with the Jane Austen-like tartness of its predecessor, “Washington Square,” but it’s more than that. It’s a horror story.
The first critic to notice this, and to lend it adequate stress, was, of all people, Ezra Pound. In a brief essay from 1918, he wrote, “What I have not heard is any word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life.” In a footnote, he added, of James, “What he fights is ‘influence,’ the impinging of family pressure, the impinging of one personality upon another.” We think of Osmond, the supreme impinger, all the more cruel in his confinement of Isabel’s spirit because she gave herself to him, rather than to his rivals, in a defining flourish of her liberation. That, it turns out, is precisely what rouses his contempt. “One ought to make one’s life a work of art,” he tells Isabel, sounding like a warmup act for Oscar Wilde; any hint of aesthetic levity, however, vanishes after the marriage, once she realizes that he is an anti-Pygmalion, quenching her vital fire and nailing her into place like a statue. Osmond did not fall in love with our heroine; what he loved was “the idea of taking to himself a young lady who had qualified herself to figure in his collection of choice objects.” That is what monsters do, especially the polite and patient ones: they harvest souls. Hand them a human in full bloom, and what they give back to you, after a few seasons, is a pressed flower.
Is there a blush of self-accusation here? When James calls Osmond “a student of the exquisite,” whose “ideal was a conception of high prosperity and propriety,” was he glancing in the mirror at his own ambitions, fearful of what harm they might, if brandished too freely, inflict on other selves? It goes without saying that James, who chose never to marry, was infinitely kinder than his villain; but I agree with Gorra when, having recounted the closeness of James and Minny Temple, he frowns over “the speed with which he reconciled himself to Minny’s loss.” In short, the elbow of the creator—someone, as Gorra says, “whose job is to turn life into narrative”—is forever nudged by opportunism. If Osmond is uniquely menacing, it is because he resembles a writer who writes nothing, preferring to take a woman as his text.
Yet he is not alone. Listen to all the other schemers in the book. “I don’t pretend to know what people are meant for,” Madame Merle says, adding, “I only know what I can do with them.” She would say that, of course, being Osmond’s co-conspirator, but consider Henrietta, the journalist in search of a topic, who admits to Isabel that “I should have delighted to do your uncle,” or Ralph, musing on the newly arrived Miss Archer with his mother:
“All this time,” he said, “you have not told me what you intend to do with her.”
“Do with her? You talk as if she were a yard of calico.”
Ralph, hands in pockets, with not much time to live, is the most benevolent character in the book; yet if even he displays “the crooked timber of self-interest in the most altruistic of intentions,” as Gorra proposes, what hope is there for the rest of us? Are we all so mercenary, cutting and trimming people, whether unwittingly or by design, to fit the pattern of our own desires? Such are the politics of personhood. There is always the option to remain alone: “A woman ought to be able to make up her life in singleness,” Isabel reflects, and that assurance stares ahead to what we, though not James, would hail as the feminist cause, requiring no male prop. At the same time, any retreat into the solo self, for either sex, must be shaded with a special dread: “the isolation and loneliness of pride had for her mind the horror of a desert place,” we learn of Isabel, in words that seem to herald the parched cries of “The Waste Land,” and the truest hell is to wind up like Osmond, immured in the plush safety of his own home and the fortress of his own brain. And so the book traffics back and forth, with sublime indecision, between the need to stand firm, in Emersonian majesty, and the yearning to break one’s pose and join the more crowded landscape of mankind. “That account of the limits of self-sufficiency is what, above all, makes ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ stand as a great American novel,” Michael Gorra declares, and the case that he mounts for the defense is unlikely to be put with more conviction. “It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself,” Pound wrote in his tribute to James, adding, in triumph, “Here the thing was done.” We are left, in Ralph-like idleness, to wonder what Henry James would make of our current state. To him, one imagines, it would rise up like a bad dream; he would see an archipelago of solitudes, feverishly interlinked, with bridges collapsing as fast as we can build them. He is our foremost explorer of the private life, and of what it costs to preserve. We need him more than ever. ♦
Did Proust read Henry James to get the idea of the anti-novel, the anti-narrative, the exquisite gorgeous butterfly pinned to the wall imitating life? Nabokov the lepidopterist would certainly agree that there were a few bell jar moments in this novel:
“If he wished to make himself felt, there was soft and supple little Pansy, who would evidently respond to the slightest pressure.” James omitted the line, and its surrounding passage, when he thoroughly revised the novel, in 1906, for the New York edition of his works (and thereby hangs another tale), yet the jolt of that earlier, unrefined image feels dreadfully suited to Osmond, for whom Humbertism, actual or threatened, would make a pleasing addition to his secret stash of sins.
Is it another Humbert Humbert seducing the young and the very young that Nabokov described in Lolita? Was it young America in Isabel seducing Old Europe in Osmond?
And it is understandable that Eliot asked Pound to edit The Wasteland because of Ezra's brilliant penetrating insight. Turning the gorgeous picture of young Isabel first arriving at that tea party on the Thames into a dusty portrait is permissible---if the writing, like Proust's, is as luscious as this:
She had been looking all round her again,—at the lawn, the great trees, the reedy, silvery Thames, the beautiful old house; and, while engaged in this survey, she had also narrowly scrutinized her companions; a comprehensiveness of observation easily conceivable on the part of a young woman who was evidently both intelligent and excited. She had seated herself, and had put away the little dog; her white hands, in her lap, were folded upon her black dress; her head was erect, her eye brilliant, her flexible figure turned itself lightly this way and that, in sympathy with the alertness with which she evidently caught impressions. Her impressions were numerous, and they were all reflected in a clear, still smile. “I have never seen anything so beautiful as this,” she declared.
With an introduction like this, Isabel is a picture of perfection. She never becomes a Dorian Grey, but becomes a trophy on the wall as the anti-novel does not move forward, but ascends in a gonfalon bubble of moral planes.
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