Quarrel & Quandary (20 page)

James evaded Woolson whenever it pleased him. In January of 1894 she evaded him, and horribly: she threw herself from the window of her “little high-up apartment,” this one in Venice, recently let. Like James himself (and like William and Alice), she was subject to periods of black depression. When the report of her death arrived, James at first thought it was from influenza, and prepared to go to the funeral. But when he learned she was a suicide, he recoiled, pronounced her “deranged,” and insisted that she “was not, she was never, wholly sane.” According to Gordon, this “slur of uncontrollable
dementia
” had a self-protective aim. “The coded message is plain: no one,” she argues, “not the best of friends, could have prevented this death.” The publicity James had always feared did, after all, explode around him. As long as three years after the event, the
New York Herald
was identifying him as “the principal mourner,” and offering as “the truth about Mr. James’s bachelorhood” his having been “this other author’s devoted slave.… Miss Woolson was not to be won.”

Three months after Woolson’s death, James committed himself to an extraordinarily uncharacteristic task. Woolson’s sister and niece, Clara and Clare Benedict, were sailing from America to Venice to dismantle the little high-up apartment and all its accumulated treasures. James left London and eagerly joined them in the work of sorting and clearing—sacrificing five full weeks to manual drudgery in Woolson’s memory. This seemingly charitable act had a deeply self-serving purpose. The continuing wet weather called for a daily fire, and into it—either trusted or unnoticed by his companions—James tossed every scrap that touched on himself or revealed anything that might cause him uneasiness.

Woolson served James ever afterward. A version of her turns
up as the unnamed woman writer in “The Altar of the Dead”; as May Bartram in “The Beast in the Jungle”; as Miss Gostrey in
The Ambassadors;
and as Miss Staverton in “The Jolly Corner,” a title derived from “Cheerful Corner,” Woolson’s childhood home. It was from a story of Woolson’s that James took the phrase, and the metaphor, of “The Figure in the Carpet.” Three times he visited her grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. And, most mysteriously, in the autumn of 1894, in Oxford, he sought out the furnished flat she had occupied for the two preceding years and briefly let it; he slept in her bed.

Lyndall Gordon begins her remarkable study—intuitive, scholarly, novel-like, bold—with an amazing image. In 1956, four decades after James’s death, a BBC program in his honor recorded, from Florence, the voice of an elderly woman who as a young girl had known James. She was remembering snatches of a scene he had related, all the while oddly laughing, about the death of “some very famous person” in Venice, about having to “do certain things,” and about dresses, and a lagoon, and “horrible black balloons.” Gordon opens her history with a reconstruction of this fantastic (and perhaps fantasized) memory, drawing also from a passage in “The Aspern Papers.” A gentleman in a gondola in the middle of a Venetian lake is in the act of heaving into the water a bundle of lady’s garments, all dark-colored and nicely tailored:

It seems unlikely that James, with or without the Benedicts’ leave, would have contrived so strange an expedition to dispose
of Woolson’s clothes. And yet the unlikely, the driven, the weird, were never foreign to his imagination. Gordon’s picture of swollen sleeves and torsos resisting drowning, stubbornly bobbing, is as suggestive as she means it to be: a woman returning, a woman refusing to vanish. The two women, Minny Temple and Constance Woolson, whose phantoms took hold of James’s vision, fevering and inflaming it, again and again replenish Gordon’s thesis. Posthumously, they fed his genius. But when they were alive, his genius beat them off, defending itself with the isolating fortifications that alone sustain literary obsession. Before Harry turned his back on her, Minny believed her cousin’s goodness passed comprehension. Woolson, older and worldlier, had a more sardonic view of what to expect. In a story about a literary lion, published a year after the start of her problematic friendship with James, she wrote: “Let us see a man of genius who is ‘good’ as well.” The skeptical quotation marks emphasize her discernment: the ruthless sovereignty of the Master, the defensive selfishness of art.

There appears to be no record of Henry James’s ever having seen a movie. He died in London in 1916, at the age of seventy-three, a dozen years before the introduction of sound. The highbrow term “film” was decades in the future; what people went to was the picture show. And if Charlie Chaplin was deemed an artist by the discerning few, James was assuredly not among them. No one distinguished more stringently between High and Low than this acclaimed literary Master, author of matchless tales and architecturally resplendent novels. And wouldn’t he think of movies as Low?

But James was enraptured by drama, and all his life tried to succeed in the theater, the only medium available to his era. “The dramatic form,” he wrote in 1882, “seems to me the most beautiful thing possible.” And another time: “An acted play is a novel intensified.” He was single-mindedly obsessed by the notion of the scene. As a novelist, he explained, he worked on “absolutely scenic lines,” and developed dialogue as it might be employed in a script, “with the loose end as gross an impertinence on its surface, and as grave a dishonor, as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on the right side of a tapestry.”

The evidence, then, is that James would have welcomed film, with its quicksilver dissolves, its ghostly special effects (he was in love with the ghost story), its lavish costumes and intensified
color, its precision of landscape and weather and sky, and particularly its capacity for living portraiture through the technique of the closeup, rivaling in facial revelation anything he might have seen in the great galleries of Europe. He was, besides, sympathetically open to technical advance. When writer’s cramp forced him to abandon his pen, he turned at once to the newfangled typewriter (the “typewriter” being, for James, the typist). Though still mainly in the period of the horse-drawn, he now and then enjoyed tooling up and down the countryside in Edith Wharton’s chauffeur-driven motorcar. The progress of sophisticated film technology, had he lived to see it, would not have daunted or inhibited him.

Yet there was a Hollywood side, in the negative sense, to James’s script-writing experience. Theater managers—who at that time were both producers and directors—got in the way of his purist ideas of dramatic art. Like many television and movie potentates nowadays, they were apt to fix solely and wholly on mass taste and mass profits, hoping to woo the trendiest and most sentimental audiences. After several unsatisfactory theatrical ventures, and especially after the humiliating failure of his 1905 play,
Guy Domville
, when he was subjected to jeers and howls from the pit, James gave up trying to please a larger public. In shame and fury he railed against showbiz, its “vulgarities and disgusts, all the dishonor and chronic insult,” and said he intended “to chuck the whole intolerable experiment and return to more elevated and independent courses. I have come,” he burst out, “to
hate
the whole theatrical subject.”

And in
The Tragic Muse
, his 1888 theater novel, he has a character cry: “What crudity compared to what the novelist does!”

There is a temptation to say the same about any film adaptation of a complex and nuanced work of fiction. A novel is, first of all, made out of language; it is language that determines whether a novel’s storytelling trajectory will land it in the kingdom of art
or in the rundown neighborhood of the hackneyed.
The Portrait of a Lady
, James’s earliest full-scale masterpiece, is at its core an effective melodrama, chillingly equipped with an unsuspecting victim and sinister schemes and disclosures. What lifts it beyond melodrama is exactly what movies have no use for: acute, minute examination of motives; the most gossamer vibrations of the interior life; densely conceived villains and comic figures who cast unexpected shadows of self-understanding; a rich population of minor characters, each of whom has a history. And more: something atmospheric, something akin to what we might call a philosophy of the soul—a thing different from up-to-date sensibility.

A movie, by contrast, despite its all-encompassing arsenal of skills, probing angles, mood-inducing music, and miraculous technologies, is still a picture show. It shows us pictures above all, and Jane Campion’s backgrounds and views in her film version of
The Portrait of a Lady
are immaculately beautiful—reminiscent of nineteenth-century canvases, and of the era of Beaux Arts. And if they breathe out a kind of museum insularity, that is what confirms their power: we know we are in another time, another and older England and Europe. Fabled sites become fresh pageants. An English country house, Rome and Florence, ancient churches and crypts and palaces and plazas, the Colosseum itself, all pass before us with the picturesque glow of authentic old lantern slides. But they are not sentimental; they convince.

At least three in Campion’s cast
^*
are unerringly persuasive in the same way. John Malkovich plays the callous, languorous
dilettante, Gilbert Osmond, precisely as James imagined him: an aesthete devoted to objets d’art, for whom human beings too are objects to be turned in the hand at will. Martin Donovan, as Ralph Touchett, the heroine’s consumptive cousin, sees omnisciently with eyes marvelously lit by both irony and longing. As Madame Merle, Barbara Hershey fully incarnates James’s idea of the schemer, as vulnerable as she is dangerous, who lures Isabel Archer into a pitiless marriage with Osmond, Madame Merle’s former lover and the father of her unacknowledged child.

But Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, Madame Merle’s dupe, is far more Campion’s creation than James’s—even though, given the confinements of her medium, Campion keeps reasonably close to James’s plot. Fatherless and motherless, a spirited young beauty, Isabel is plucked out of provincial Albany, New York, by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett (Shelley Winters, banally miscast), and brought into the wider opportunities of aristocratic England.

There she enters the life of the grand country estates, and declines the offer of a brilliantly advantageous marriage to Lord Warburton, a member of Parliament (Richard E. Grant). Alone and dependent, she has seemingly given up her chance of access to a glittering society, and old Mr. Touchett, her wealthy banker uncle (John Gielgud), is bemused by such perversity. She has earlier refused a persistent American suitor, Caspar Goodwood (Viggo Mortensen)—she is ambitious beyond the velvet enclosures of marriage.

Just here is the conceptual spine of James’s novel, its electrifying and chancy theory. Isabel Archer dreams of living hugely, of using her vivid capacities to take in the great and various world of boundless experience. Ralph Touchett, her admiring invalid cousin, sympathizes, understands, and makes it all possible. He persuades his dying father to leave Isabel a magnificent fortune. The Albany orphan is now an heiress, freed to infinite choice.

This is the point Campion unluckily loses sight of. She misses it both in detail and in scope. Isabel’s first and buoyant choice is to voyage around the world, the bold outward sign of her valued new freedom—a freedom that Campion burlesques in a series of scenes (Isabel riding a camel, visiting the Pyramids) rendered playfully but reductively in silent-film style. Yet James recounts Isabel’s worldly education as a serious enrichment: “She had ranged … through space and surveyed much of mankind, and was therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different person from the frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to take the measure of Europe.”

And while Nicole Kidman is lovely, slender, and effectively winning, Campion has omitted the buoyancy and the ambition. Kidman’s Isabel takes the measure mainly of herself, in erotic and autoerotic fantasies: Isabel caressing her own lips and cheek, Isabel prone in a vortex of three suitors who surround her like a whirligig, Isabel walking moodily through a landscape with a hand at her breast.

The film’s opening moments startle with the faces and voices of a group of contemporary young women who comment on the act of kissing—and though such a prologue may seem extraneous to what follows, it is plainly offered as a key to the director’s sensibility. Self-oriented eroticism (or call it, more generally, a circumscribed interest in one’s body), a current theme of a certain order of feminism, here replaces James’s searching idea of a large and susceptible imagination roiling with world-hunger. James describes Isabel, fresh from America, as “at all times a keenly-glancing, quickly-moving, completely animated young woman” who emits a “radiance, even a slight exaltation.” No flicker of this expressive vitality can be glimpsed in Kidman’s passive, morose, tearfully suffering Isabel.

This is partly because a film based on a novel is, perforce, essentially an excerpt, and Campion mostly gives us the climax
and sorrowful denouement of Isabel’s story, and little of its eagerly yearning premise. Of motives there is nothing. Isabel, who had earlier eschewed marriage as too narrow for her possibilities, marries after all, and discovers herself to be Gilbert Osmond’s unsatisfactory, even inferior, bibelot. The palatial interiors darken, husband and wife turn bitter. The two old lovers, Madame Merle and Osmond, working together, have seized on Isabel only for her money, to assure their daughter’s future. And the daughter, Pansy, a pitifully obedient child warehoused in a convent, is still another victim of this pair of polished plotters. (But Valentina Cervi, a robust young Italian actor, is irritatingly unsuited for the timorously fragile Pansy.)

Here, in these final concentrated scenes—trust tainted by malignancy—Campion is wholly faithful to the outer progress of James’s narrative. Beyond this, her art supplies what no novel can: the direct sensation of voluptuous gazing—so many doors opening into spaciousness, objects, liveried servants, a boiling, dizzying ballroom.