We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art — Henry James
An English Home, Albert Coburn (1907 illustration)
Dear friends and readers,
I began Gorra’s marvelous book as an alternative read to Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch, a kind of companion-match antidote: I felt it was the same sort of book, one which took the reader through a deeply-felt reading experience of a book, in this case James’s The Portrait of a Lady. I discovered that Gorra’s does not pretend to be a semi-confessional autobiography as semi-literary criticism; indeed I learned very little about Gorra’s life, though I did learn how he reacted not only to James’s The Portrait of Lady but many of James’s other books — without any particular references to Gorra’s life, except that Gorra is also American and regards himself as having an American identity (whatever that is). Gorra’s book rather elaborated in how James’s other books and The Portrait fit into James’s private and writing life, into James’s career, and into how James’s readers and critics have seen him since he began publishing and up to the time of his death.
In other words, this is an unconventionally-written biography. Gorra’s can offer insights into James’s life not allowed by most methodologies: his method is to bring together how he feels (impersonally put) about James’s writing, what he Gorra sees, and how James wrote James felt about it with what we know of James’s life from all sorts of angles, some of them drawn from phases of writing The Portrait of a Lady. Gorra weaves a sort of biography where the writer does not have to follow the life history of the subject but can weave in what he or she wants and when, with the justification that well I’m going through associations from this novel. So we skip dull parts of the person’s life and also get new sorts of insight as the material is reconfigured.
We out James in a new way: this is a new sort of biography, one which moves out from one central great book, rather like someone deciding to write Trollope’s biography by intensely going through every detail of say The Way We Live Now or The Claverings — or both together. Mead’s book was not a biography of Eliot in disguise it was “her life” in Eliot
For example, Gorra can’t prove it yet he makes a persuasive case for seeing Isabel Archer and Ralph Touchett as a doppelganger out of the dying Minnie Temple, James’s cousin. Sometimes the method is inadequate: I was much entertained by his reaction to Henrietta Stackpole – only he seems not to know that Stackpole is also an unkind caricature of Kate Fields, beloved of Anthony Trollope, an entertaining travel writer, journalist in her own right.
Martin Donovan as Ralph Touchett (Portrait)
Another example: Gorra re-sees Isabel’s early refusal to marry in terms of James’s — for James was under pressure to marry; her going to Europe, her choice of waiting to see (Ralph Touchett’s) of being a witness not a doer — all these three are brought together with James’s gayness and made sense of — he is masking himself in Isabel is the point and it’s an interesting one, for else we just do really have another story of the chaste heroine making a bad or good marriage.
He dwells on Madame Merle who emerges upon Isabel getting the money (women has a good nose) and how she stands for a social animal. She and Isabel have a debate with Isabel coming out on the side of that she is not expressed solely or nearly solely by her outward behavior, dress, occupation — as Madame Merle implies. I’ll add that From Daniel Deronda the mother shows one has a self apart which will break away, but Isabel’s tragedy will be she cannot
Barbara Hershey as Madame Merle (Portrait)
In a section early in the book called the Envelope of Circumstances where Gorra talks almost of himself — at least of an American identity (which often makes me uncomfortable) — he elaborates on the idea that Portrait is unusual in its lack of religion and Gorra says this is true of all James’s work but the ghost stories. I know I like James and feel he is equally European/English (not British)
I much enjoyed the chapter in Gorra after the one detailing all James’s homosexual friends, contacts, strains (“An Unmarried Man”): in “A London Life” he tells of how James came to live in London, that it was no foregone conclusion: he tried Paris first; about an expensive apartment he lived in for quite a while that was well located for theater, plays, making a life of going out to dinners and socializing with the upper class, near enough to publishers and parks. I quite envy James — we also get a strong sense of him supporting himself through writing for magazines and the kinds of texts he was writing to do that. I knew all this but not in this way and Gorra quotes from James’s wonderful thick diary commonplace book so well. He intuitively holds onto and writing about the most astute utterances of James: after G.H. Lewes died, James visited her and described her as “shivering like a person who had had a wall of her house blown off.”
It may be these names of James’s possible lovers and his relationships with them are known, but I’ve never seen the series of men set out so clearly, the stories told so intelligently, and rightly the doubts sowed over the idea James was physically celibate without overdoing it. People are still today writing books which obscure this aspect of James’s life and when they do write about James’s complex feelings, they write turgidly, with embarrassment, hedging. Gorra tells of James’s important life long relationship with his woman amaneunsis-secretary, Theodora Bosanquet whose biography of the boss she spent 2 decades with and lived in close intimacy gives us a lot of the leads and details that help us see this aspect of James’s life. Her book: Henry James at Work and published by Hogarth Press (the Woolfs).
Thus I found finding Gorra’s book more satisfying than Mead’s because I was made to realize more about James and his writing. Most of what Mead wrote I knew about Eliot — and while she is applying our information about Eliot is more subtle autobiographical ways, it does not change what I have seen. Since James’s homosexuality has only recently been openly admitted to and discussed as central to his life — as it was the way what gender you are is — there are new insights to be gotten
He begins with the richness of the letters and how much we can learn about James from them (most have not yet been published, a many year project by many people). The question is how far can we be ourselves apart from social life and within ourselves how much there is a real separate I from construction. I agree with him (and James) it’s there but vulneragble and fragile — as we see in Isabel Archer. Touchett is in retreaet and sinks his life in Isabel’s – I believe that outside his job Jim sunk his life in mind and job in the last years was also endured to support the two of us. That it was not him is seen in how he didn’t mind retiring and only thought of going back in order to move to England.
Still the great source for all people wanting to know James is a book edited by Mattiessen, a continuous diary: it’s vignettes of going out, little bits of stories he later worked up into his great novels, thoughts on aesthetics, whatever popped into his head: The Notebooks of Henry James. I read it while doing my dissertation and trying to understand the creative mood of reverie underlying novels. Gorra emphatically uses this book.
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Rome, outdoor Market, Piazza Navona by Guiseppe Ninci (1870)
Gorra first shows us James’s situating himself in London and ambivalent; how he tried Paris, and we go on to his trips to Italy – where much of the later action of The Portrait of a Lady takes place and we get a chapter on Madame Merle and Osmond – not moralizing but how they represent some real aspects of the expatriots. It was not all high (or today unacceptable) art. Then Gorra moves into a portrait of the community in Florence and Rome at the time. Several interesting pages on his relationship with Constance Fennimore Woolson’s. As sympathetic to the people caught up there as Mead on Main – I’ve been at least to the Spanish Steps and some of the places Gorra describes – which he takes you through with him as your walking guide – and connects them to the atmosphere of the novel which is un-Victorian … bringing all this to bear on Isabel’s wrong choice gives it a whole new kind of aspect – and connects it to the modern reader too.
Gorra follows James from place to place as James writes The Portrait of a Lady. James was escaping his American identity as he traveled from place to place in Italy, and tried to find a quiet place to write a lot and yet have some company and enrichening landscape. From expatriats he moves onto strangers, and how James was surrounding himself with strangers, was himself an exile, a stranger, and saw that the American communities were themselves disconnected from Italian society, didn’t understand it, in search of what they couldn’t find at home. Then he says they were – -and James is – drawing on the heritage of different countries and cultures to make a new amalgam for themselves.
That aspect of American identity as self-invention I do see in myself, though the amalgam is mostly from English sources. I turned to read James’s Roman Rides as Gorra said it’s better than just about all James’s early fictions — and it struck me that’s right. The opening is a meditative piece on the landscape of the campagna. Jim and I went there and walked alone one morning — we did not take our children who were with us on that holiday because they would have been so bored. Often the places he and I wanted to go to were to them places with nothing there. James does a gorgeous rendition of the feelings one can have just outside Rome among these ruins in this desolated place — it was still that way in 1994. How important place and history are to some authors.
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John Malkovich as Osmond (Portrait)
Gorra then moves onto Isabel’s strange choice of the stifling Osmond and how Isabel came to make such a bad choice. Gorra suggests we don’t bring in the sexual angle enough and Isabel was attracted to the man who declined openly to chase her. I did not remember that time went by and Isabel traveled with her sister I Europe and then Madame Merle in the Middle East (that was dangerous). Ralph tells her she is going to be put in a cage but it’s no good. We are not shown the moment of submission, the marriage or its first experience. Why? It’s a sleight of hand that takes us to thwarted aspiration, imprisonment, narrowing but not how she got there. Are these James’s fears for himself?
The book moves onto Venice as James does – and an immersion occurs as James is drawn into this defeated place filled with poverty striken people, even then dying, dependent on tourism. James himself eat and drank expensively as Gorra finds this out by going to the same place (still there). A political fight over the vaporetto and the vaporettos won – James didn’t like the noise either. He makes two friends whose houses he can stay at, ordinary upper class American and English, not the resident famous homosexual population …. It’s the evocation of these places through quotation of James’s travel writing that makes this section so appealing …
John Singer Sergeant, An Interior in Venice (1899)
Gorra is trying to relive the experiences James had while writing the book at the same time as he re-imagines what the characters feel as the story progresses: tracing James’s steps in Venice, looking at paintings Sergeant made of the expatriot people into whose houses James was welcomed. From James’s letters Gorra picks up that the landlady was offering her daughter as a sex partner by sending her to hang around the fourth floor. Byron took up such invitations, not James. He moves onto the this kind of atmosphere in Venice, and its treacheries, the grim whiff of the closed streets (seen in Sergeant”s pictures too I know) and says this seeped into Portrait of a Lady and what Isabel’s chose of Osmond brought her
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Constance Fennimore Woolson
Venice prompts by association the really poignant story of James’s long time and finally failed relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolston. Gorra characterizes her with great empathy and tells a lot I didn’t know or had forgotten. Again he brings together what is not usually brought together: how they quietly lived in one building she on the first and he the ground floor — in Florence. She apparently went to Venice to live on the assumption he would follow her but he never did. The letters to and from and her were burned. As everyone knows she killed herself by jumping out a window and he tortured himself by trying to drown her dresses — why he just didn’t throw them out or give them away as rags I can’t guess.
Woolston’s death though partly in reaction to James’s behavior is obviously not his fault. She suffered depression much of her life. When she’d finish a book she’d be in a state of nervous collapse. It’s said some people are exhilarated by it. I was neither. Eliot went into collapse mode.
As he tells the story, Gorra connects it James’s “Aspern Papers,” “he Beast in the Jungl”e (Sedgewick renamed that “closet”) and a couple of other uncanny stories (“The Romance of Old Clothes) which he retells very well — and The Wings of the Dove.
Quite what this has to do with The Portrait of a Lady? it illuminates James’s feelings towards relationships, the real life of expatriates … A central “sin” in James is when one person uses another, makes them an instrument for his or her needs. Imposing your will on them. He suggests Lyndall Gordon (who wrote a conventional biography) accuses James of doing this to Woolson. Now the second version a Portrait of a Lady occurs well after Woolson’s death and so we are left to make our own allegory here.
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Paris, La Rue de Rivoli, Anonymous, undated
I love the illustrations in this book, picturesque, in the mode of Alvin Coburn, the illustrator for James’s turn of the century complete revised edition.
Following upon the chapter on James and Constance Fenimore Woolston, we move into “sex, serials, the continent and critics.” A full chapter on how near impossible it was to get into print and distributed in the UK and US too a story which told what every one know to be the case with sexual life; you could only tell supposedly what life was supposed sexually to be like, to teach lessons. The French were much freer.
This part of the book includes a chapter on the magazines James wrote for and Gorra uses is also valuable beyond telling us how James dealt with the problem of instalment publication: demands for a certain length, for cliff-hangers, who and where his work appeared (with what provided the context of respectability for the reader); it’s an intelligent portrait of a world where people are still reading magazines. James was apparently a writer who had in mind his whole book so would start a new instalment not with a reader turning the pages of a magazine who might need (as we call them today) recap. Today’s American context is alluded to: the importance of Atlantic, Harper’s then – New Yorker today
Gorra is showing us how Isabel Archer could come to say she did not want to hear anything that Pansy could not hear — this is supreme foolishness on her part; far from being dangerous for her, it will be dangerous for her not to have more knowledge of what a man can do to his wife once he marries her — Cameron’s movie makes Osmond into a sadistic man in bed too — as does Andrew Davies make Grandcourt in his film of Daniel Deronda. This is chapter comparing French fiction of the period that was admired by the English with the English. A rare novelist to break through what was allowed was George Moore (Esther Waters) but his novels were not distributed by Mudie’s.
Gorra spends a long chapter on the whole long chapter in Portrait of a Lady after Edward Rosier comes to call – he is the young man who loves and could be loved by Pansy, but Osmond won’t allow it, and he lets Isabel know that she ought to use her sexual pull on Warburton to lure Warburton into marrying Pansy — for Osmond assumes that’s a front for a love affair Warburton means to have with Isabel.
Isabel is sickened, appalled, desolated — we come upon her well after the marriage has taken place, we even missed the birth and death of a young son. Gorra says this is deliberate on James’s part: he does not want to show us directly (remember our thread on showing and telling) such dramatic moments but their affect on consciousness.
I was not surprised to see Gorra attribute some of James’s sophistication to his reading of Daniel Deronda where Gorra finds the same kinds of techniques. The difference is that James goes on for much longer (he says) and makes the narrative stop still and ruminate a past we’ve not seen.
He also says the shrewdest most aware appraisal of Portrait was by Constance Fenimore Woolson. So James is in a women of ecriture-femme — with Oliphant ranging herself on the other side in defense of what she thought of as English fiction.
He finds this so original. I don’t think so — Trollope does it, Austen does it, Eliot does it a lot but the interior monologue is important and Gorra’s way of discussing it as becoming central to the art of fiction does show one important innovation. Hitherto story was said to count a lot and more; and it’s clear that for James the actual story matter — the events that manifest the inner life — does not matter. Gorra says this changes the novel’s emphasis and is part of a switch over that finds an extreme in Woolf.
Romola Garai as Gwendoleth Harleth Grandcourt telling Daniel Deronda (Hugh Dancy) about what her life has been (2004 Daniel Deronda, scripted Andrew Davies)
No what makes the difference is the content. Trollope’s Julia (The Claverings) does not think one really unconventional thought. She never thinks to herself these people are shits, why should I want to sit with the housekeeper, look at their terrible values. Nor any of them until Daniel Deronda with the magnificent portrait of his mother (the same actress who played the role in Davies’s film played Madame Merle in Campion’s film) Isabel does not break away but she has utterly subversive thoughts about the values of those around her. Eliot invents another set of ethics using Gwendoleth Harleth’s experience (which Davies’s film brings out), implicitly anticipating Flaubert but much more sympathetic to the woman, as is James. Again and again Gorra links James to Eliot. So when Gorra exaggerated because he so goes on about it, one can learn and see …
He is tracing an important direct new line — into it was fed the travel writings that he has been going over too. Roman Rides, Venice. Also William James’s books on cognitive psychology show up the new interest. The new line was objected to intelligently by RLStevenson in his Gossip on Romance and James’s prefaces, his Art of Fiction was intended to intervene in this debate. Gorra’s discussion of James’s use of stream of consciousness in Portrait of a Lady is so rousing that I become eager for Phyllis Rose’s A Year of Reading Proust to come — I just hope I’ve read enough of Proust’s volumes to be able to appreciate it. I’ve only read one and almost to the end of the second volume.
Gorra then uses his analysis of Isabel Archer’s long meditation to launch into more than James’s Art of Fiction; he makes large claims for James as an innovator of a new kind of novel: one based wholly on inner life, nuances. Of course these were written before — in epistolary narratives of high quality in the 18th century but not self-consciously. Gorra argues that Woolson was one of the first to understand, and Howells to defend James and his Art of Fiction should be understood as part of a debate which includes RLS’s Gossip on Romance.
I like how Gorra fits this into the growth of serious literary criticism of the novel, taking it seriously. James could not get himself to write in the other “new” school of naturalism (Princess Cassamassima is the one that may be linked): too pessimistic, too bleak he felt, though Howells did it in his Modern Instance. The novel’s stature is going up
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Henry James by Katherine McClellan (1905)
The last part: putting out the lights. This one takes us through James’s response to the deaths of his father and mother; he came for the funerals, just missed the dying. I think he’s right to argue against Edel’s insistence it was the mother who screwed the family up: common sense and all evidence suggests it was the father (if people can be screwed up who produced what Wm and Henry James and even Alice did and lives the lives the first two did) with the mother complicit. It seems to have been a contest which of the parents self-destructed first and in reaction to the other’s coming demise. They did cling together.
As with Mead at the close of her book, but without personal references, Gorra then makes leaps into the fiction to find analogies about death. Gorra shows how often James wrote about death after this period, and how a metaphor for loss. In this chapter he says it was at this time James began to keep his journal of all anecdotes, an important source for this book (and many others).
And he suggests it was after this or around this time several of the great Victorians died and I’m glad to say — serendipitiously — for James this includes Trollope. Trollope for James a major voice like Eliot, Flaubert and Turgenev. James’s essay on Trollope has been very influential — perhaps too much so but I didn’t know about the line calling Trollope a “difficult mind.” That’s good. What a different list from the modern canon, no?
James’s “The Altar of the Dead” is about the ghosts we live with, the ghosts in our memories of who died and Gorra speaks eloquently of it. Alice was another great loss by then and Constance Fenimore Woolson. No wonder I liked this chapter and it leads a powerful chapter centering on the last image Isabel has at the end of her mediation: Madame Merle and Osmond talking together. Gorra takes us through to Isabel’s realization that when Madame Merle said to her “let us have him” (italics added) Madame Merle has given away 1) that she and Osmond think that Isabel wants Warburton for herself, not that she is appalled by the proposition that she should use his attraction to her to win him to marry Pansy as payoff for a liaison; and 2) they assume what bothers Isabel is not the amorality of all this but that she wants Warburton for herself, and finally 3) Madame Merle is Pansy’s mother.
When Osmond’s sister comes to tell Isabel of this truth however indirectly it’s after the realization and this is followed hard on by the most quiet and devastating of needlings I’ve ever read. Madame Merle comes in to tell Isabel as Isabel is contemplating visiting Ralph as he lies dying (after Osmond has forbidden it) that it was Ralph who gave her the enormous sum of money that made her “a brilliant match,” spoken in bland feigned innocence she is nonethleless triumphing over telling Isabel that Isabel owes this hellish marriage to Ralph. And pointing our to her yes “she was perfectly free” so she did it to herself.
One problem for the modern reader who wants to read hard truths about life is these earlier novels (and many since) end ambiguously in ways that allow us to think the characters will be all right, make do by following conventional norms and thus uphold the very structures that the whole novel has been designed to expose.
Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer Osmond (Portrait, scripted Laura Jones, directed Jane Campion)
It is a startlingly even terrifying moment when Madame Merle so quietly and blandly lets Isabel know it was after Isabel who chose to marry Osmond and she was given all the clues she needed to what he was if she had only looked.
Austen has scenes of withering corrosion where the speaker does not realize what he is saying and the listener is mortified and hurt, but nothing quite so horrible in feel or mean and malicious in intent. Madame Merle’s purpose is to make Isabel angry at Ralph and prevent her going — as Lucy Ferrars in telling Elinor of the long engagement was to make Elinor give up on Edward, be very angry with him. The increase in subtlety and what has been done is a hundredfold.
For the book’s last chapters, see the comments.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Then an iconoclastic chapter — franker than most. Gorra writes from the vantage that after Portrait James was never again as elated by what happened in his career and had real disappointments, endured attacks from American critics (over Bostonians especially). James did not make enough money from his books and tried the stage, didn’t do too badly with a stage version of The American but (as many of us know) that was followed by the disaster of Guy Domville.
Gorra goes over the later friendships — unexpectedly with RLS.
It’s a moving account. It is to me not altogether convincing. I feel Gorra omits too much the reality of how James could not openly present his gayness: this was a bad inhibition. In The Bostonians he is presenting a lesbian couple in a sense and he veils this. He did write great books afterward and they were recognized by some: Princess Casamassima a mid-career book is brilliant (I love it), and in a way naturalistic. The Golden Bowl is for me another kind of masterpiece I can read. The Turn of the Screw is hard but is worth it — almost it could not be told at the time any more frankly. He saw more into what he was doing than Trollope I’d say.
He was respected and beautiful editions of his works printed.
E.M.
The next chapter: Gorra sort of reverses himself and says after all James did gird his loins after the years of indecision, seeking money from stage and not being sure how to go about development; Gorra suggests the finding of a place in Rye and its community, turning to the “scenic” method (short novels which make a heavy use of dialogue and stay with enigmatic ambiguity over the moral horrors they show) begin to emerge from James’s pen at the same time as he becomes more open about his homosexuality, falls in love (in effect) with an artist named Anderson and in a sense enacts the character of Rowland Mallet from Roderick Hudson (except Hudson kills himself while Anderson was content to exploit James mildly).
Gorra’s story is this: after having said that after mid-career and Portrait, James seems to lose himself altogether and not get his act together to write in a sustained vision ever again. He just about says this. But then he turns and says that slowly James did again return to a set of deep preoccupations we find in Portrait of a Lady worked out in a new and deepening way in his later books. Princess Casamassima and Tragic Muse still remain odd ones out – which I suggest is probably not true, but rather they relate to other aspects of James’s concerns: his politics for example, and his interest in stage and theatricality.
I do see that in The Golden Bowl, the later book I most admire in the book itself however enigmatically James shows us what these marriages are made of, how they are also mean bargains based on a kind of bullying *of Charlotte) or amoral indifference (on the part of the prince), a further development from Isabel Archer’s story. I like the idea of a real talk between Ralph and Isabel.
The second part of “Second Chance” then makes good the claim that James not only finds himself but begins not to care if his reader does not approve and be more bold in what he shows of ruthlessness for power, wealth, status, objects, incest, sex as an instrument of power. It’s not bodily sex that grips James in his books but what is mentally done to people by sexually having them. James is more open to acknowledging the facts of sexual life – but not as much as Gorra makes out. There is still no explicit homosexual man or woman.
Then James’s shock at America after the 19th century: his visit; the triumph of “the superficial and apotheoisis of the raw.” Yes he was a snob but he also saw the mindless shrieking in its first forms. Not that the older world of taste was gone: it was through the people of such a world he made his deal for his New York Edition where he rewrote a number of his novels. Gorra seems to think the project was a disaster – I know it gave us the prefaces, some remarkable illustrations and the later edition of The Portrait of a Lady more open that it was Ralph who used Isabel too.
E.M.
I’ve come to the end of this beautiful book and like other books of this type am sorry it’s finished. I wish I could have gone on reading it – and will read the annotated bibliography which is put in essay form. It is an inventive form of biography – reminding me most of Richard Holmes in Footsteps: Confessions of a Romantic Biographer except Gorra will not tell us of him as a private person. One of the insights I felt I had at the end is why I like James’s writing so much – James does keep himself apart: well that’s it. In Gorra’s book he is revealed as the solitary imaginative man that he was before he went out for those evening dinners.
This insight lies behind Edel’s book too – only he ever trying to squash the homosexuality likes to use terms like “guarded.” True enough but it’s a deeper impulse than that. We see again and again James on retreat and that’s why he could never live with Woolson as a partner.
The end part of the book has James at the end of his life. The New York edition was a disaster because at first it made derisory amounts of money for its publisher. James had his own income to live upon, not the publisher. It is today enormously respected for its enriched texts and those prefaces but not in its own time. James feel into an overt depression in 1909 we are told – William was dying and then dead (Gorra is superlative at his choice of quotations throughout: “His extinction changes the face of life for me”. (My Jim is now extinct; his extinction changes the face of life for me utterly endlessly. I will never get over his death. I can never be with another man. I will be alone until I die.) One night William’s son found James literally crying crying crying. I have not really done that. I wish I could.
James was also desolated at the start of war and unlike many people foresaw the blood bath, immediately compared it to the US civil war. He looked back at the 1890s and 80s and said this is “what the treacherous years wer e all the while really making for and meaning.” Like Whitman, but not as a nurse, James visited wards of wounded men. At the same time , his changeover to British citizenship is attributed to Wilson and the US’s decision to stay out of the war and do nothing.
He did around this time retrieve himself once more as a writer: he produced the two autobiographies – I’ve not read them: A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother … These sold and were liked. The characters come alive and Gorra likens some of them again to characters in Portrait of a Lady & other of James’s fictions: with Henry Sr becoming a sort of Daisy Miller
The book ends on the problem of the Portrait’s ending. So many people don’t like that Isabel goes back to Osmond; James also does not let us know for sure that she does or any sense of what she will do when she gets to Rome. Once more Caspar Goodwood accosts her and we get one of the most sexual scenes in the novel: is she escaping men like that. In Jane Campion’s movie they are seen as overt harassers (Osmond is the cunning insidious domineering one). Gorra suggests that Isabel escapes many our questions as James does unless we “go at” the man and his book differfently. The last sentence of the preface to the last version of The Portrait of a Lady is “there is really too much to say”: Gorra’s method is one which makes too much to say, he rather suggests.
Ellen
Clare has asked for a recommendation for a good biography of Henry James.
As a one volume biography Kaplan’s is the probably the best; he is frank and gives you all the important details of the man’s life, but I suggest for a “feel” for the man, an inner truth, Colm Toibin’s The Master, a novelistic turn on the biography will get you closer to him. Yet (it may be that having read much of Edel’s five volumes years ago and lots of James’s fiction and non-fiction), I am finding Gorra a good substitute for a biography, a biography done in a more interesting stimulating manner which leaves lots of room for inner and outward life, because I have read such books. But I’m not sure that this is so.
On why (a guess on my part) Toibin says that Lydall Gordon is the best biography on James, Lydall Gordon treats at length James’s relationship with Minny Temple, bringing out some of the insights into the fiction that Gorra dwells on and she is the first to unearth and treat at length James’s relationship with Constance Fennimore Woolson. Again Gorra is heavily dependent on Gordon’s findings for his own further exegesis.
But there is a problem. Gordon is a relentless normalizer. She is of the school that cannot see James doing anything sexual physically — when you think of all the young men he had in his house and his solitary traveling (and crumpled states in the photos too) I have to ask, Does she need DNA found on a toilet? I tried another of her biographies and found I couldn’t get on with it — Emily Dickenson. Nothing wrong with her mentally (why “wrong”) and certainly not a lesbian. Gordon came up with a soothing physical ailment of some sort, permanent of course.
You have to not mind the upbeat tone. To my mind it’s no wonder she’s made a success as a woman biographer. She does write lucidly and with with sensible wit that goes down easy. I’m a little surprised at Toibin as I would have thought personally this would not be his sort of thing but he does really care that the real details of James’s life coming out.
I can see reading a single long conventional chapter in a book of potted “lives” and then turning to Gorra — much of James’s life is recounted in Portrait of a Novel only more inventively. The problem is the short one volume biographies that exist (earlier ones like Dupree) and the short ones often omit James’s homosexuality — and Edel insists the man lived utterly chastely — which is improbable. So I recommend a good long article which gives you the stages in chronological order, then Toibin and then Gorra.
Ellen
Ellen,
This sounds like a fascinating book. I am now interested in reading it.
It’s a better book than Mead’s — more original, more informative (generally) and more insightful. Better than Kaplan’s conventionally set out biography.
Yes, James is definitely indebted to Austen. When Isabel arrives at Gardencourt (debt here to Eliot) and exclaims, “It’s just like a novel!” I couldn’t help thinking of Catherine in Northanger Abbey. The lessons are similar, reality vs. romantic/gothic fantasy. In this sense James is also indebted to Flaubert as Madame Bovary’s delusion also derives from romance novels.
Regards,
Elaine
I really took great pleasure in the novelty of Mead’s book and followed your lead in buying Gorra’s book. I have looked at the first chapter, but now we have a week off before our next Trollope read I have time to start this book on James. Your blog on the book has enthused me to get on with it, so thanks for writing this wonderful blog.
Clare
Ellen, thank you for your long and cogent essay on both Gorra’s book and your own reactions to both James’s Portrait and his travel writings. I very much admire that you wrote so inclusively and covered Gorra’s book in detail but used material from Trollope to Toibin in your discussion. You’ve manged to encapsulate so much in what you wrote that I feel it deserves a long and thoughtful response. This I cannot do now, and so I hope to have some time on Sunday to reply to several of the subjects that you rightfully find so intriguing both in James’s life and in his writings.
Particularly, you say: “Gorra’s story is this: after having said that after mid-career and /Portrait/, James seems to lose himself altogether and not get his act together to write in a sustained vision ever again. He just about says this. But then he turns and says that slowly James did again return to a set of deep preoccupations we find in /Portrait of a Lady/ worked out in a new and deepening way in his later books. /Princess Casamassima /and /Tragic Muse/ still remain odd ones out — which I suggest is probably not true, but rather they relate to other aspects of James’s concerns: his politics for example, and his interest in stage and theatricality.
“I do see that in /The Golden Bowl/, the later book I most admire /in the book itself/ however enigmatically James shows us what these marriages are made of, how they are also mean bargains based on a kind of bullying *of Charlotte) or amoral indifference (on the part of the prince), a further development from Isabel Archer’s story. I like the idea of a real talk between Ralph and Isabel.”
And here I think you reach the heart of Gorra’s inability to see/appreciate many of the deeper strains that run through the major novels, many tales, and *the plays* of Henry James — as well as Gorra’s neglect (well, in fairness, his book is about Portrait, and not the later, four major novels) of the great fact that Henry James — and not James Joyce or DH Lawrence — invented “modern” fiction for the 20th and 21st centuries with his use of a totally new prose form: stream of consciousness, albeit as units of long (200-300 word) sentences that
actually parse grammatically. You are also correct to see the importance of James’s female secretary — for it was to her that James, lying on his sofa much like an analysand of his contemporary Sigmund Freud, would dictate that last group of long novels; she would take down his thoughts in her own form of “shorthand” and then present James with pages of his thoughts every morning all neatly contained on paper from use of her wonderful new machine, the typewriter. And lo — a new form of novel writing had emerged.
There are other major, major ways in which Gorra miss-sees/miss-interprets by not having enough information or by not realizing the importance of various people/relationships/places to James. Two important omissions and a crucial error of his are: (a) not recognizing the supreme importance to Henry James of his many-faceted relationships to his brother, the famous — revered in his time, really — William as well as those deep emotional relationships to his cousin
Minnie Temple and several other women; (b) although his personal erotic
interests may seem quite obvious to us, this was something quite socially forbidden in James’s and quite illegal in England; this is indeed the subject covered so masterfully in C. Toibin’s The Master; (c) James really considered himself an American returning to Britain to “realize” his British roots, not a wandering ex-patriot — he loved Italy for many reasons but would never have thought of himself as an Italian or a Frenchman either, despite having spent time in Paris; (c) the entire dichotomy of New World (America) innocence vs. Old World “experience,” cynicism, etc. really is one of the major themes central
to all of James’s fiction and certainly cannot be ignored in any discuss
of this novel in particular; (d) for James, until the middle of his writing career, writing fiction was secondary and even a “warm-up” exercise. Being a writer for him meant being a *playwright* and being a successful writer meant being a successful playwright. All his creative energies were geared to this! (How little we know of ourselves, really.) When what he felt was his magnum opus, Guy Domville, was booed and hissed off the London stage at its premiere, James suffered a severe emotional breakdown and thought he might not write again. How very wrong he was — and how very fortunate for us!
Since I’ve actually gone one for some length here, I’ll continue with some of those specifics now:
–Gorra’s interpretation of Portrait and the character analysis and motivation of Isabelle, Osmond, and Ralph Touchett quite miss the mark in my opinion. Isabelle Archer — as James himself often said — is Hawthorne’s Pearl (of great price) from The Scarlett Letter, the heiress now grown and returned to the Old World to “make her mark” (I think James intended the pun here). Osmond truly is the evil usurper — and remember he wants the rich nobleman for his daughter Pansy’s husband, so for Osmond, marriage to Isabelle is a practical double play — and, with the help of his accomplice, the wicked Mme Merle (blackbird in French) — has the additional sadistic psychosexual gratification in capturing his innocent, rich, and pretty songbird Isabelle. Ralph Touchett can
only sit impotently (yes, one uses this word with the sexual implications that may also be autobiographical for James) by and warn Isabelle, for he is dying of consumption — a disease that took his dear cousin Minnie Temple from him (note how another MT heroine dies young and avoids marriage in Wings of the Dove); even a cursory reading, however, leaves the reader with the impression that Touchett is gay and so would not have been the right husband for Isabelle, much as he deeply loved her.
–Gorra’s ignorance of the sources — both real people and fictional — for many of the characters in the novel becomes a handicap.
–Ignoring James’s theatrical aspirations is a great, great mistake. If nothing else, it glosses over the fact that in theater/drama — by allowing one to assume a *role* — one can try out, assume, mask, and HIDE IN any one of many identities with a sense of safety. When James received such a chilly reception as a playwright, he was forced to confront the reality that any mask/masque-ing (hence the importance of Venice and the masked ball in the late novels) he would do would have to be encapsulated in those long, long sentences he created to explore complex characters and their even more complex motivations.
Elissa
I’ve often thought that James was writing about himself when he wrote “The Figure In The Carpet” – where a famous novelist tells a young critic that there is a little trick, which he strings from book to book, and that nobody has found it out. James takes up the same theme in so many of his novels, reworking it from different angles, and always freshly – in The Ambassadors, in The Golden Bowl, and in The Wings of the Dove. But The Portrait Of A Lady is my favorite novel of all time. I’ve written about Isabel Archer a little bit more here: http://www.irrelevanceofhope.blogspot.com. tying some elements of her character to a novel coming out this month, which was inspired by James’ incredible psychological portrait of Isabel.