Quarrel & Quandary (19 page)

Except the canny biographer. It is precisely James’s selfishness that Lyndall Gordon meticulously teases out of the archive of extant letters, and out of her own insightful talent for making revelatory connections. As literary detective, she shuns the mischief that is motivated beforehand by what the excavator intends to find; it seems clear that she did not set out to uncover this aspect of James’s character, and came upon it as a surprise. (It is certainly a surprise to the Edel-oriented.) Gordon’s purpose was to learn more, much more, about two women in James’s life—“female partners, posthumous partners,” she calls them, “in that unseen space in which life is transformed into art.” The two were Mary Temple, known as Minny, James’s lively cousin, dead of tuberculosis at twenty-four, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, three years older than James, a successful novelist whose friendship with him was terminated by her suicide in Venice. Both figures have long been staples in all biographies of James. And while Woolson has had the status of a somewhat eccentric walk-on, Minny Temple has been granted the role of a pervasive minor goddess whose luminous influences touched several of James’s American heroines. She can be traced most incisively in the dying Milly Theale of
The Wings of the Dove
, and even earlier in the dying Milly Theory of “Georgina’s Reasons.” Her living spirit animates the independent Daisy Miller, who succumbs to Roman fever, and also the freedom-claiming Isabel Archer of
The Portrait of a Lady
. Such intimations are hardly new; yet Gordon adds richly to what we already know of Minny Temple’s variegated and enduring presence in James’s imagination. (In the case of Woolson, much of what Gordon has
to tell is altogether fresh disclosure.) But even if we are sufficiently informed of Minny Temple’s phantomlike immanence, we have until now been in the dark about what the real Minny hoped for—and what she expected of—her cousin Harry.

There were six Temple cousins; four were girls. Minny was the youngest, James’s junior by two years. Their parents had died of tuberculosis within months of each other, and the orphaned children were sent to live with the Edmund Tweedys, relatives of Henry James, Sr., who was their uncle. Minny was unconventional for her time; she might be unconventional for ours: once, on an impulse, she cut off all her hair. She had the recklessness of unfettered individuality; she was spontaneous, original, thoughtful, witty, passionate—“the amateur priestess of rash speculation,” as James put it. In her teens she cultivated a fervent bond with Helena de Kay, a fellow school rebel (and future portraitist). At twenty, with the Civil War just over, she was surrounded by a body of intellectual young veterans who were drawn to her exuberance, among them Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Chipman Gray (a future professor of law whose correspondence with Minny was put to use by James in his late memoir). Though James’s two younger brothers, Bob and Wilky, at sixteen and seventeen had been thrown into the fury of battle—Wilky with the first black regiment, led by Colonel Robert Shaw—James contrived to sit the war out at home. On the basis of a bad back (the legendary “obscure hurt,” dismissed by a specialist as a temporary strain), he managed to dodge the draft, trying out an unsuccessful term or two at Harvard Law School, and devoting himself to turning out stories which he sent, unsigned, to magazines. William James, too, avoided army service, but Minny lost a brother to the war, and Bob and Wilky were permanently broken by it. When Wilky, severely wounded and hospitalized, pleaded for “a visit of 2 or 3 weeks” from James, he declined; he was preoccupied with the
composition of a tale about murder. And there it was, the beginning of the deliberately blinding discipline of obsession: if a just war summoned, he would write tales; if a needy brother called out, he would write tales. It was not that he placed writing above life—he
used
life—but rather that he placed writing above compassion, and surely above danger. Compassion interrupts, danger interrupts absolutely.

With Minny, during and after the war, he walked, joked, talked seriously or playfully, meanwhile pursuing his “long and secret apprenticeship,” as Gordon terms it, hiding his neophyte efforts from his family. In 1861 the Temple sisters settled with their guardians in Newport, an outpost of high-minded Boston. Julia Ward Howe was there, together with artists, historians, and assorted bluebloods and utopians; some, like the Jameses, came only for a season. It was here that James took in, for all the future, the quicksilver shimmer that was Minny—the ease, the freedom, the candor, the generous stride and the generous mind. James in old age remembered her, in the “pure Newport time,” the “formative, tentative, imaginative Newport time,” as “absolutely afraid of nothing.” She, for her part, confided to Helena de Kay that her cousin Harry was “as
lovely
as ever, verily the
goodness
of that boy passeth human comprehension.” Each discovered enchantment in the other, James in a sympathetic recognition of daring unbound by social constraint, Minny through sensing affectionate approval, as she had failed to feel it in the other Jameses. Minny reported that William, in fact, thought her “a
bad
thing.” James relied on Minny to see as he saw, through the imagination; and Minny trusted Harry to be kind.

He was seventeen, she fifteen, when they began to roam the Newport landscape together; then he was twenty, she eighteen; and then he was twenty-six, ready to escape family and country for a life of autonomy—after which they never again met. He
was on his way to London, with valuable letters of introduction in his pocket. He lunched with Leslie Stephen, and called on George Eliot, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Darwin; he was inching into the great world of letters. From England he went on to France, Switzerland, and Italy, heading for Rome. Minny, left behind, was compelled to exercise her own large ideas of autonomy within the walls of a society that confined young women to certain clear limits; pushing against commonly accepted restraints, she seemed oddball, a bad thing. She was restrained in still another way: she had contracted tuberculosis. Her sister Kitty, at twenty-five, had married Richard Stockton Emmet, a wealthy man of forty-seven. Minny, thin and ailing, went to live with the Emmets in Pelham, New York, where she was isolated and without real support. The Tweedys, her guardians, had in effect cast her off. As for her James relations, William, Alice, and Mrs. James openly disdained her, while the self-absorbed Henry, Sr., charged her with pride and conceit, and advised her to practice Christian humility. With her lungs hemorrhaging, it was plain to Minny (and to the medical wisdom of the period) that her only chance for improvement lay in a warm climate: “Rome, with its dry winter and cloudless skies, was the common hope of consumptives,” Gordon explains. “Another winter in Pelham,” Minny wrote to her cousin Harry in Rome, “might go far to finishing me up.” In both social and medical terms, she was unable to travel alone, and the Tweedys, who went often to Italy, and who had reared the orphaned girl from the age of nine, never once invited her to go with them. A family proposal that would have taken her to the warmth of California in the company of her sister Elly fell through when Elly’s husband, a railroad magnate, decided that remaining in the East was better for business. “The grand plan for Minny’s recovery was incidental,” Gordon concludes. Minny’s
recovery, it appeared, was incidental to nearly everyone close to her.

She did not believe it was incidental to cousin Harry. Rome was her coveted goal, and not only for the curative powers of its climate. Rome signified civilization, beauty, the American girl’s dream of an idealized Europe; and Harry was there. “I am not very strong nowadays, altho’ it is summer,” she wrote to James. “I would give anything to have a winter in Italy.” “I want to go abroad,” she had pressed him earlier, “and I mean to think deeply about it, and try to get there.” She went so far as to arrange for a chaperon to accompany and care for her, but soon withdrew from this scheme: she was not well enough. But there was a deeper obstacle. She was slowly growing aware of James’s resistance to any tendril of a notion of dependence on him. Even relieved of physical responsibility for his cousin, he did not welcome her presence. He was at this time in a struggle with serious constipation and low spirits; he had fallen into a kind of invalidism. “To think that you should be ill and depressed so far away,” she sympathized, “just when I was congratulating myself that you, at all events, were well and happy, even if nobody else was.” “Nobody else” was Minny herself, but James was not responsive to this appeal or any other. The true blow came when he left Rome and returned to the dampness of England. She understood then—despite the old consolations of their longstanding intimacy—that she had no part at all in the principle that governed his being; her letters ceased. To William he confided his intention “to write as good a novel one of these days” as
The House of the Seven Gables;
his passions were overridingly directed to literary dominion. He may have cherished what he saw as Minny’s “intellectual grace” and “moral spontaneity,” but if she threatened, even at a distance, to distract his concentration and his will, he fled. Intellectual grace and moral
spontaneity were not to intrude on his siege of the citadel of art—until, after Minny’s death, they, and she, became the brightest stuff of his novels and tales.

He had, then, the capacity to disappoint—to disappoint even the tenderest relation of his life. The tenderness, with Minny, was of a purity and a clarity; there might be a skein of romance thrown over their old walks and talks, but there was no question of marriage, no teasing sexuality. And James was still Harry.

Ten years later, at thirty-six, he had become Henry James, acclaimed man of letters, lionized author of the hugely popular
Daisy Miller
. It was at this time that he found himself pursued—at least he felt pursued—by Constance Fenimore Woolson, herself an American expatriate, who had traveled to London to present him with a letter of introduction. The letter wove together certain interesting connections. It had been given to Woolson by Henrietta, another of Minny Temple’s sisters, who was now living in Cooperstown, New York—a village named for Woolson’s great-uncle, James Fenimore Cooper, the famed novelist of the American frontier. Northern-born, Woolson moved South after the Civil War, visiting battlefields and military cemeteries, interviewing freed slaves, and publishing well-received fiction grounded in these explorations. When her mother died, she began a wandering Continental life, mainly in Italy, in hotels, pensions, or rented flats, industriously bringing out novels and stories. Her reputation grew sufficiently for the
Nation
to charge her, in a swipe at literary women, with “infesting the magazines.” She was, in short, a serious professional in an age when women who wrote were ferociously disparaged. “Women aren’t literary in any substantial sense of the term,”
James complained, and produced the mocking tale of “Greville Fane” to prove the point. He called female reviewers “the hen-sex,” and fumed at being seated at dinner with “a third-rate female novelist.” Gordon slyly notes that even the monumental George Eliot did not escape diminishment: if she had seen and known more of life, James said, “she would have done greater things.” This from a man who had avoided battle at home, frequented country houses abroad, and charted his characters’ secret meditations when they were mostly indoors and sitting still.

Woolson and her letter of introduction missed James in London—he had already left for Paris—and caught him in Florence. It was a friendship that was destined to be unequal. She came to him as an adulator, defining herself—suitably—as the lesser writer; but he made her out to be less than she was. On one occasion he wounded her bitterly when he described her in a letter as “amiable,” the kind of blandishment he applied to the generality of ladies whom he was an old hand at charming. She knew she was fiercer than that, and darker, and a hundred times more ambitious. He had met, Gordon tells us, “a writer absorbed in writing even more completely than himself.” In their early acquaintance in Florence they made the rounds together of churches and galleries, paintings and sculptures, James leading and discoursing, Woolson rapturously attending. He had begun by thinking of her as a neatly dressed spinster, deaf in one ear, “a good little woman,” “a perfect lady,” “Miss Woolson.” When her intellect and dedication showed themselves indefeasibly, he chose to call her Fenimore: an open recognition of sorts, which led to his talking over with her his current work. “I see her at discreet intervals,” he admitted to William Dean Howells, editor of the
Atlantic
, who published both Woolson and James. “She is a very intelligent woman, and understands when she is spoken to.” He had advanced, cautiously, to an appreciation of her—but
she was always subordinate. She was, in his phrase, a “resource.” He sent her his dramatization of
Daisy Miller
(it rankled him that it was never staged); she read and responded during an intense period when she was laboring thirteen hours a day to complete a manuscript of her own. One of her novels, serialized in
Harper’s
, was so successful that she felt obligated to apologize to James. “Even if a story of mine should have a large ‘popular’ sale,” she told him, she of course recognized that “the utmost best of my work cannot touch the hem of your first or poorest.” And if he exploited her admiration and the usefulness of her literary scrutiny, she did not protest.

Nor did she protest that he hid their friendship; she colluded in his project of secrecy. Ten years of association were suppressed. “None of his London circle knew of her presence in his life,” Gordon reveals. He rarely spoke or wrote of Woolson, and then only obliquely, masking the quality of their relationship. In 1886, on a visit to Florence, where she was then residing, he spent three weeks in rooms literally next door to hers, in a house she had rented. It had all the comforts of a private domesticity. A similar arrangement was undertaken the following year; again they divided the house, she on an upper floor, he on a lower. These prolonged occasions, with their meals and talks and inevitable familiarity, were kept carefully screened from James’s usual society. And still he could disappear from her ken for eighteen months at a time. She may now and then have been a solace to him, but he dreaded being linked with her—he feared the publicity of an “attachment.” As for Woolson, she not only understood when she was spoken to; she understood far more. A character in an 1882 story, “The Street of the Hyacinth,” intimates her sense of James: “He was an excellent evader when he chose to exert himself, and he finally got away from the little high-up apartment … without any positive promise as to the exact date of his next visit.” “My plans are uncertain,” the Jamesian
persona asserts. “I have a habit of not assuming responsibility, I suppose I have grown selfish.”