Portrait of A Novel (39 page)

James was seventy when the second of these volumes appeared, however, and his age told. His heart troubles of 1909 had been imaginary, but now he did suffer the shooting daggers of angina. He recognized too that he could not again risk a lonely winter in Rye, and took a final London apartment on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Nevertheless, these last years did bring a share of the triumph that the New York Edition had not. The advance he received for his memoirs was justified by their sales, and a group of his admirers commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint his portrait. James sat for nine days in his friend’s Tite Street studio, wearing a high collar and a dark suit relieved by the gold chain of his watch. He felt embarrassed by how much he liked the result, but it is in fact one of the painter’s greatest works, and iconic in its depiction of the novelist’s shrewd judicious authority. Sargent refused to accept his fee, and James accepted the painting only in trust; it hangs today in London’s National Portrait Gallery. And a March 1914 letter to the ever more sardonic Henry Adams suggests how open and curious his sensibility remained. The historian had written to complain that the two of them were the last of their generation, with
“the past that was our lives . . . at the bottom of an abyss.”
Yet to James that was no reason not to take an interest in what remained, in the “reactions—appearances, memories” of consciousness itself. He still enjoyed observing his own mind at work, and with the bitter wit of Adams’s letter before him, he suspected that his old friend did too.

That buoyancy could not last. In that same year the lights went out across Europe, and he saw the proud tower of his seemingly stable civilization topple. The guns began to flame on the Continent, their report heard across the Channel in Rye, and in August 1914 he wrote that the start of the Great War seemed to
“
undo
everything . . . in the most horrible retroactive way.”
The long peace had made him believe that such a wreckage had become impossible, but that faith now lay in ruins, and this sink of blood stood revealed as
“what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and
meaning
.”
His autobiographies brought back the past in one way. The war reproduced it in another. James likened the German invasion of Belgium to the Confederate shots on Fort Sumter, and he soon became an obsessive visitor to military hospitals, walking down the long wards and trying to give what comfort he could. It wasn’t much, just cigarettes and conversation, but it made him recall Whitman’s visits to the wounded during the Civil War; and he must also have remembered his brother Wilky, lying broken in the hallway of their house in Newport. Yet though James tried to draw some comparison between the poet’s war work and his own, he did not himself do Whitman’s hard physical labor of nursing, and he could not shake a sense of his own futility. All he could do was write, and at least the essays he wrote about Belgian refugees and the need for more ambulances did help to raise money for their causes.

Then in 1915 he reached a final decision. James had sat out his own war, while believing in its cause, and he knew that however hapless a soldier he might have become, he had missed something that other men in his generation had known. Now he found himself repelled by his homeland’s isolation and inaction. Washington might warn Berlin against destroying American shipping, but the country seemed bent on neutrality. James believed that America and Britain had the same fundamental interests. He had staked his life upon that, upon America’s connection to Europe’s common culture, and was appalled by Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to join the Allied cause. That culture now mattered to him more than any accident of origin, and he therefore applied for naturalization, after almost forty years of residence, determined to demonstrate his
“attachment and devotion to England, and to the cause for which she is fighting.”
The application required some sponsoring witnesses, and among them, along with Gosse and Pinker, was H. H. Asquith, his new nation’s prime minister. James surrendered his passport, and on July 26, 1915, he became a British subject. Many years before, the newspapers of his birthplace had been outraged by
Hawthorne’s
account of all that the New World lacked. Now they again accused him of disloyalty; but the future would confirm his conviction.

It was the last significant act of his life. Just a few days later he fell ill, and his letters now carried word of a
“bad sick week . . .
a regular hell” of gastric troubles and chest pains that confined him to his flat along the Thames. On December 2 in Italy, where a boy named Ernest Hemingway would later drive an ambulance, the Fourth Battle of the Isonzo came to an indecisive end. All that day it remained quiet in the trenches of the Western Front, and in London, Henry James had a stroke. He lay on his bedroom floor, his left side numb, but with voice enough to call for his servants. He dictated a telegram to William’s family, and Alice immediately left for England, fulfilling a promise she had made to her husband. A second stroke followed, though James’s mind remained steady for a few days more. Then he began to wander.

At times he thought he was in Ireland, at others in California, and he refused to listen to a barber who told him they were in London. He asked Bosanquet to move her typewriter into his room, and dictated a few brief troubled pages about his own
“sketchy state of mind”
and the “damnable . . . boring” business of trying to get better. Later he addressed a letter to his “most esteemed brother and sister,” but he now believed that he was Napoleon, and the note concerned the imperial apartments in the Louvre. Once he told the gray authoritative Alice not to interrupt him. He improved slightly as the new year began. As a British citizen, he was now eligible for honors, and he both understood and enjoyed the news that he had been awarded the Order of Merit, a distinction more valued than any knighthood.

James lingered in the winter-darkened city while the Gallipoli campaign ended in defeat, and the United Kingdom introduced conscription. He recognized the people he saw, and spoke when he could, but though his phrasing remained forceful, the stitching was gone. On February 23, 1916, he asked Alice to tell William that he would soon be leaving, and on the 27th his consciousness fled. Henry James died at six the next evening. His sister-in-law, who would take his ashes back to Cambridge, said that in his last weeks his hand sometimes moved
“over the counterpane as if writing.”

I
sabel starts up from her pillow toward dawn, believing that there is someone by her bed,
“a dim, hovering figure in the dimness of the room.”
She had once asked if Gardencourt had a ghost, and Ralph had told her it did—a ghost no happy person had ever seen. Yet by now she has suffered enough, as the novel enters its last chapter, now the apparition can come to her, and the ghost has a name. For it looks as if Ralph himself is standing there, and as she stares into the gray light, she sees “his white face—his kind eyes; then she saw there was nothing.” She isn’t afraid but she knows that something has happened, and when she goes to his room, she finds that the doctor has just placed his dead hand by his side.

To Isabel, Ralph now looks like his father, and she remembers that six years earlier she had seen the older man
“lying on the same pillow.”
The novel has made a circle. James has brought both her and us back to where we began, and his account of Ralph’s funeral only increases that impression, attended as it is by all the living characters of the book’s first chapters. Lord Warburton is there, and Henrietta Stackpole, and even Caspar Goodwood. Isabel is surprised to see him; he had visited her in Rome, but she had assumed he was now back to America. The only people missing are those who entered the book with Mr. Touchett’s last illness and death, and of them Isabel thinks as little as possible,
“postponing, closing her eyes,”
as though she were hiding in Gardencourt’s shade. Still, she recognizes that her cousin’s death means that her mission is over. She has done what she left Osmond to do and knows she must soon face the choice that both Ralph and Henrietta have asked her about. She knows too that no matter which path she takes her choice will not be happy. Osmond may be dreadful but marriage imposes “certain obligations,” and Isabel stands condemned either to the mortifications of the Palazzo Roccanera or at the bar of her own judgment. And at this point James’s readers grow fearful. The whole weight of the book sits in our left hand, and just a few thin pages remain on the right. George Eliot liked to kill off her heroines’ unsatisfactory husbands, but James had already put on record his dislike of last-minute rescues. Isabel’s return seems inconceivable, and yet as we read, our imagination of her future, of what might happen next, hits the same blank wall that she does.

A week after the funeral she sees Warburton coming up the drive. She has heard of his engagement to a
“Lady Flora, Lady Felicia—something of that sort,”
and when they meet, he seems embarrassed, both eager for her approval and yet aware that he has something to explain. Afterward she wanders away across the lawn and eventually finds herself by a bench beneath a stand of great oaks. Isabel recognizes the spot as one where
“something important had happened,”
though it takes her a minute to remember that it’s where she had read Caspar Goodwood’s letter of complaint on her first visit to Gardencourt, and then looked up to find Warburton preparing to propose. She has indeed circled back to her past, and sits down as she had long before, remaining there with a “singular absence of purpose” as the twilight grows thick in the trees. Then the past echoes once more, and she realizes that Goodwood himself is standing just a few feet off.

What follows is one of the most startling and in fact violent scenes that James ever wrote, one matched only by the end of
The Turn of the Screw
. And its storm will continue—it will extend to what James does to his readers, and to their sense of a proper conclusion, in the novel’s last sentences. That violence does not, however, lie in the proposition Goodwood now makes to her, his plea that Isabel abandon her husband and come away with him. He has guessed what her marriage is like, he knows the price Osmond will make her pay for her journey, and asks her to turn to him instead of falling back into
“that ghastly form.”
She has no children to hold her and they may go wherever they like, do absolutely what they please. They are free, as free to choose, in his version of things, as Isabel had once thought herself, for
“the world is all before us—and the world is very large.”
Goodwood’s words are themselves an echo. They recall the moment in which Isabel, in the first enjoyment of her wealth, had walked through London in an enchantment with possibility itself. But they also and more importantly summon up the ending of
Paradise Lost
, when after tasting the apple and being thrust from the garden, Adam and Eve must step forth into the fallen world before them. That is the world in which Isabel knows she must live: a world of constraint and necessity, in which her possibilities are limited by her past. Isabel knows, now, that we are never free to do absolutely as we please, and she knows as well that she cannot stay at the aptly named and Edenic Gardencourt. Yet Goodwood himself remains an innocent even as he invites her into adultery, and all too American in his faith in the world’s unbounded promise.

“The world is very small,”
she says in reply, but James writes that she talks at random, unaware of what she means, and in fact she feels something different. For Isabel has learned something here. She tells Goodwood that one reason for returning to Rome will be simply
“to get away from you,”
but even as she speaks, she recognizes a new truth. His force and his passion make her understand “that she had never been loved before. It wrapped her about; it lifted her off her feet.” The world is very small, and yet it has never before seemed so huge: an ocean, and fathomless. She had wanted help, some light by which to steer through the murk of her life. Goodwood’s offer makes it seem as if that help has come in a torrent, and a part of her deepest self now sinks into a sense of rapture. Her feet beat against the ground, as though treading water, and for a moment she wants to let herself drown in his arms. Nevertheless, she resists. She knows that
“the confusion, the noise of waters, and all the rest of it, were in her own head,”
and in recognizing that, she manages to recover herself and begs him to leave. But before he does, she feels his arms wrap tight “about her, and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like a flash of lighning; when it was dark again she was free.”

He is gone; and Isabel runs back to the house as quickly as she can. She had not known what to do, where to turn, what choice to make,
“but she knew now. There was a very straight path.”
Before we can follow her down it, though, we need to look at this scene once more. Women in James do kiss one another, as a sign of—often duplicitous—friendship. Madame Merle kisses Isabel when she hears the news of her fortune, and Maggie Verver will kiss her husband’s mistress in
The Golden Bowl
. But men and women almost never do, and rather pointedly we have not been given such a scene between Osmond and Isabel. Goodwood
takes
this kiss—an assault, a hot illuminating crackle. So we have to ask just what it lights up, and unfortunately the 1881 version of the novel doesn’t tell us. That kiss may show Isabel her path, but James doesn’t say why. The second version of this scene does, however, and it stands as one of the most comprehensively reworked moments in the entirety of the New York Edition. By 1906, James had been living with Isabel for twenty-five years. He was no longer the same writer or the same man as the one who had first created her, and the changes he made to this scene allow us to measure the ways in which the person who had written both
The Golden Bowl
and those letters to Hendrik Andersen had changed himself.

“She had never been loved before.” So James had written, but now he added something more. Isabel had believed herself loved, but
“this was different; this was the hot wind of the desert,”
and it no longer simply lifts her off her feet but instead forces her teeth open as if with the taste “of something potent, acrid, and strange.” She has never before been loved, not by Warburton and not by Osmond, has never known its consuming force. It burns her up—it sets her reciprocally aflame. She fears its power, and the next moment only confirms that fear, for
Goodwood’s kiss is no longer
a simple flash of lightning but instead