Life Sentences (19 page)

The hazard for our text is James’s sexual orientation. It becomes an idée fixe, the life warped by this single somewhat suppressed inclination, and the reader begins to feel roughed up by its insistence, as if he were having to endure a repetitive ad whose message will follow him home like a stray, regardless of his dislike, his shouts and shoos, or his internal resistance. Sometimes loudly, sometimes
in a whisper, the point is made. Often the issue in question is simply presumed. “His only indisputable love letters were written to men.”

When we open volume two of this life we do not find ourselves curbside in perhaps Paris, but in the upstairs study of Lamb House, Henry James’s home in Rye, smothered in atmosphere, a sea-coal fire flickering in the corner grate. He is correcting the morning’s dictation. One can almost see the camera approaching for a shot, say, of a manuscript page of
The Golden Bowl
. James’s achievement matches his figure now: stout, massive, stately. Out of the dim short days of winter, the persistent theme emerges like a figure in a trench coat. James is said to be traveling in “vaguely defined circles that a later generation—not entirely accurately or fairly—would call aristocratic and homosexual and that the middle-class press satirized as ‘aesthetic.’ ” Yet even if not quite “fair,” Sheldon Novick will mention it. Twice, in the next two pages, London’s winters will be called “masculine,” because they aren’t the stylish Easter season of balls and banquets or the vacation flight of the family to a cooling seashore cottage. “Painters’ studios … were masculine salons where artists and writers … formed intimate friendships.” Friends, too, will receive this honor: “Arthur was a slender, reserved, manly, and serious young man.…” A character, Hyacinth Robinson of
The Princess Casamassima
, when he decides not to commit the murder his anarchist organization has assigned to him, is said to have made a “manly choice.”

The other sidelong word is
intimate
, and these two are scattered like peekaboos about the text. When quizzed by his family about his London plans, James replies that “he is too good a bachelor to spoil by marriage.” Novick gratuitously adds, “Of the intimate friendships that he has formed, he says nothing.” As if he should confess to having taken up sodomy. A young, handsome (we must have these adjectives) Scandinavian sculptor, Hendrik Andersen, Novick’s choice for leading man in this heart’s play, is introduced with the warning that he will “be a most intimate friend.” Is an intimacy measure
available? Yes, it seems there is. Upon learning of the death from tuberculosis of Andersen’s brother, James writes a letter whose babbling gush makes one cringe. Can its recipient really believe in the genuineness of the emotions so sloppily represented? Andersen is addressed with two “dears” like a flight of stairs leading to a “dearest.” James’s heart is aching, bleeding, breaking. He is in torment. Having shown that he is in even greater pain than the griever, James invites Hendrik to Lamb House in Rye, where James is now living, so that he may “take consoling, soothing, infinitely close & tender & affectionately-healing possession of you … to put my arm around you & make you lean on me as on a brother & a lover, & keep you on & on, slowly comforted or at least relieved of the first bitterness of pain …” Hendrick has lost a brother but he has gained a lover who will be—wow—another brother. So James’s offer is not as erotic as it might immediately seem. While “panting” to see Arthur Benson, a new friend, the next day, James sends a note apologizing for not having written sooner, but says that, instead, he is looking forward to “answering you with impassioned lips.” True—this is rather an exaggeration if taken for “hello, dear chap.”

The evidence, such as it is, is in the letters, and somewhere in the 10,423 of those which we possess, some explicit revelations may emerge, but what we have now are missives full of emotional hyperbole, effusive flattery, and infantile cajoling that become less convincing as the verbs of desire and the adjectives of adoration accumulate. “I love you” may carry some small weight, but “I love love love love love you” less.

Sometimes hostile witnesses can be useful to your case. Frank Harris and Harold Frederic are called to the stand. According to the counsel for the defense James had finally reached such eminence as to attract attackers to him like mosquitoes drawn to CO
₂
, and one such was the new editor of
The Fortnightly Review
, Frank Harris, who “privately accused [James] of effeminacy, of being part of a shadowy conspiracy of homosexuals,” and wrote in his autobiography that James’s “well-formed, rather Jewish nose was the true
index of his character.” Unfortunately, for this testimony, Harris’s opinions were not expressed in print until 1926, when they were privately issued in Paris nearly a decade after the object of their malice had died. A better example is furnished by the novelist Harold Frederic, who was allowed to say in a letter to
The New York Times
(to my surprise) that “Henry James is an effeminate old donkey who lives with a herd of donkeys around him and insists on being treated as if he were the Pope.…”

Oscar Wilde’s plays aren’t James’s sort of thing, nor does their success improve his judgment of them, but James nominates Wilde for membership in one of his clubs, and supports him during his scandalous trial, although the scandal, for James, is often worse than the crime. James is not the kind of homosexual who feels he must always stick up for his sex. Novick, however, sometimes seems surprised. “In
The Tragic Muse
he gave what now seems an all-but-explicit and negative portrayal of an openly gay man. This latter is particularly puzzling, because James’s own loves were, so far as is known, exclusively male.”

James was unquestionably attracted to young mostly gay men, and for a variety of reasons. There appears to be enough sexual longing in him to serve a dozen, but in addition the young men flatter him, confirm his views and feelings; their own effeminate ways not only match his, but precisely because of the “feminine element” in their composition, they have more tact, sensitivity, cultural polish, and manners than bluff sailor sorts or other types of tough guy. James’s androgynous character is one of his great strengths as an artist, and he knows that the feminine in men does not merely mean the loss of a rough edge, but is often the best, the most civilized part of them.
Manly
is not his word of worship.
Civilization
is.

If you are a bachelor who is going to be a bachelor because your career must not be compromised by more family obligations than
you already bear, you will naturally seek out the company of like minded single souls of both sexes, but particularly of your own; so that to be often seen with men will not be worth a comment, nor will your frequenting of places where husbands are gratefully severed from their wives and children—of which an English private club is a perfect social instrument—be understood as anything less than necessary in order to enjoy, even if in visit-bits-and-pieces, what its members once, as bachelors, uninterruptedly took pleasure in: a quiet read, a nice port, reposeful dinner, good cigar, a leather-bound snooze. The club can be both your living and your dining room, or your library where you can borrow a book, peruse a periodical or the daily papers, rub the better shoulders.

To that end, Henry James became a member of the Reform Club, the Rabelais Club, the Savile Club, the Omar Khayyam Club, and the the Athenaeum, whose library was especially alluring. “On the other side of the room sits Herbert Spencer, asleep in a chair (he always is, when I come here) and a little way off is the portly Archbishop of York with his nose in a little book.” Later, in Rye, he joins the golf club, though he only goes there for tea after a long walk. To learn more of his chosen town he also frequents the local pub. James eventually has a bed-sit at the Reform Club, and works there when beset by solitude’s drearies at Lamb House, his place in Rye. His steno, then Mary Weld, arrives discreetly through a side door to breach this manly bastion.

At the same time, as a bachelor you can attach yourself to the fluttering edges of various sorts of interesting or useful families by your availability for dinner, your help in small emergencies, your avuncular warmth, and, of course, because you are a person who may carry the cachet of significant guest and important friend from one place at table to another as if you were a slice of something from the roast. In addition to being agreeable, these relationships will be of great value to you when the materials that most stir your muse are the ins and outs of social commerce, the hypocrisies that support manners and put a roof on good behavior. Social life will not
seem frivolous even when it is supremely so, and if you have cultivated the observant, ambitious, and witty, you will have anecdotes aplenty—ore worthy of being relieved of its roughness and rounded into impressive rings.

You will be a winner with brats of every kind, producing in them just enough fear and strangeness to induce attention and the relief of obedience. After all, the bachelor does not have to suffer the embarrassment of their education or the humiliations their maturation will inflict. In effect, you can play grandparent without the necessity of years. It is sometimes difficult for a father to put himself back in his own strident youth when he is the brunt of his child’s complaint, but for the bachelor it is easy. He is already there; in a critical sense he has obtained every family’s prized position—that of the only child.

James spends an unaccountable amount of time socializing at his various clubs and otherwise dining out (“Dear Mrs. Bell, I am engaged to go to 4 different places this afternoon between 5 & 6:30, & to do, besides, 17 other different things”); when in London, which is often, he keeps rather regular attendance at the theater, usually to see plays he will review; there are of course the customary weekend junkets to the sumptuously appointed country estates of the rich and titled—teas and shoots, stiff chairs and parlor pianos; as if evenings were not full enough, he has his own little dinners for six to preside over; then space in the day must be found in which to tend to the needs of his sister, the frequently bedridden Alice James, as well as other visits to the sick, and such Good Samaritan assignments as his tenderness insists on, for if you have many friends, you will have many bedsides. Sunday calls of courtesy are de rigueur, of course. One’s calling card must get about even when its owner does not. More important burdens—the consequence of diligence and honesty—are overseeing the settlement of estates (Alice James’s for
instance) or acting as a literary executor, or arranging, over considerable distance, the burial of Constance Fenimore Woolson after her suicide in Rome.

None of the day’s drudgeries disappear just because you are busy elsewhere, so you must hunt for lodgings, hire servants, dispose of and acquire furniture, move from a pension in Paris to a room in Rome or a villa in Venice, because London is impossible in high season, Rye lonely in winter, Italy always enticing. During his frequent periods of depression James is driven to seek a sunnier disposition in sunnier, lazier climes.

Visits to America were infrequent and irregular, but they required a major commitment. Often illness or death was the occasion for a crossing. He stayed in Cambridge when he had to, enjoyed New York when he could, and took a year off to travel the lecture circuit as far as Florida, the Midwest, and California, with intermittent halts to have some teeth pulled. At all points James was industriously absorbing scenes, gathering anecdotes, obtaining suggestions for plots and themes, learning about issues he might attach to his singular interests, and allowing his impressions to be absorbed by his ravenous artistic unconscious like a stockpot that is cooking its way toward cassoulet.

Then he must discover a moment for dashing off letters of a business sort or those required to retain his good standing in society (thanks for this socialite’s party, that author’s book, a weekend’s pleasure). What cannot be dashed are publishing problems, theatrical issues, political causes. Naturally he must stay in postal range of his many, mostly intimate pals. Novick writes that while away from the city, James “kept in touch with his London friends by patiently writing letters in the evenings after dinner, often writing until the early hours of the morning.” He saved his worn-out wrist and hand for these chores, and began dictating to a typist his articles and books, but his work as well as his social life was frequently hampered by various other physical ills: chronic backache and constipation, jaundice which seized him in Venice, those periodic depressions, attacks
of gout which made him goose-step when he had to walk, and, as he aged, a case of shingles that sent him to bed, bouts of angina announcing the end, many of the latter accompanied by fears that he was bereft of friends and alone in his misery.

Meanwhile, James managed to compose new plays, or adapt some of his stories for the stage, and oversee their production; choose, edit, revise, and preface texts for the New York Edition; supply magazines with stories, articles, profiles, travel pieces, and reviews; furnish publishers with triple-decker novels, serialized romances, and singular masterpieces.

James’s ties to his extended family were strong, yet he lived apart for most of his life, and his brothers fled the nest as if they had just burst from an egg. Speaking of eggs, women of James’s class were slaves of their wombs and spent large portions of their adult lives pregnant, since families were commonly large, in a condition closer to an illness than a blessing, and one that often ended, not just shortened, their lives. Henry’s mother managed to have five children in seven years, and although they were healthy kids, Alice, William, and Henry suffered from severe bouts of depression, William and Henry had inherited their father’s bad back; both lives would be threatened by a congestive heart, while, like a consumptive who catches cold, Henry would be a victim of his father’s stammer. “James had twenty-one first cousins on his father’s side alone.…” Henry’s sense for the family bordered on the feudal, and that meant hierarchy, discipline, duty, property, and privilege. His immediate family had a dash of ordinary in it, but father, daughter, and two of the four sons were extraordinary individuals. James himself remained uneasy about his roots until he acquired Lamb House, where he was finally firmly affixed to a place that would gather and hold history as he hoped it would hold him.