Portrait of A Novel (18 page)

These businesses allowed visitors, or indeed the city’s resident Anglophones, to arrange their lives without the need to know Italian or even any Italians. And certainly those tourists were needed to fill the Church of England Chapel, which seated 800; the American Episcopal church was even bigger. But the Storys’ tea-parties would in any case have drawn upon a different population. Murray recommended three English doctors and one American. There were several English bankers, though James himself used the Italian house of Spada, Flamini. There were the embassies, and above all there were artists. The 1872 edition of Murray’s lists 36 studios run by American or English sculptors and painters, while noting that the roster includes only established figures—not students, not beginners. Few of them have a reputation today. The real talent had begun to go instead to Paris, where one could study the painting of modern life, and of the permanent residents the most interesting was the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, a friend of Hawthorne’s whom James described as looking like a
“remarkably ugly little grey-haired boy.”
Her work has more tactile play than Story’s; and she had also helped import a pack of hounds for the newly established Roman hunt.

The smaller Roman world-within-a-world in which James moved and of which he wrote contained just a few hundred people. I count some fifty names in the letters he sent to Cambridge in the winter and spring of 1873, and many of them belong to fellow transients. The Bootts fell into this category, down for the winter from Florence. So did a new friend, Sara Butler Wister, from Philadelphia. She was the daughter of the English actress Fanny Kemble, at whose London fireside James would later sit, and the mother of Owen Wister, the future author of
The Virginian
(1902). James admired her beautiful hair, but insisted to Quincy Street that he didn’t
“at all regret that I’m not Dr. Wister.”
He had other meetings with old friends and acquaintances who were, like Lord Warburton, simply passing through. Early in March he met up with a rather feeble Ralph Waldo Emerson; a few weeks later he saw the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Henry Adams on their way back from an Egyptian honeymoon. But such encounters were just hometown gossip, and James wrote to William that though he supposed Rome was full of interesting people,
“I doubt that there is any very edifying society.”

Nevertheless, he decided in these months to surrender himself to the entanglements of expatriate life. He complained about it, but he put his work on hold in order to absorb the sights and sounds of this rarefied milieu. He went to three weekly receptions, he lunched and dined and called, and in the floating world of the Roman spring this spare man soon found himself
“in the position of a creature with
five
women
offering
to ride with him.”
His companions on horseback included both Mrs. Wister and Alice Mason, the divorced wife of the Massachusetts politican Charles Sumner; but his favorite companion remained Lizzie Boott. With such a routine it is perhaps no wonder that the emphasis of his Italian fiction would soon begin to change. Most nineteenth-century American novels about Italy—
The Marble Faun
, James’s own
Roderick Hudson
, to some degree Howells’s
Indian Summer
—devoted themselves to the lives of artists, providing a sanitized version of
la vie bohème
in which the pursuit of culture is entirely compatible with bourgeois propriety. As such, they offered a conventional account of what their authors believed their countrymen wanted from the Old World. One of the things that separates
The Portrait of a Lady
from those books is its indifference to the world of the studios. Its representative American in Rome is Madame Merle, who keeps a smart third-floor pied-à-terre, not Hawthorne’s Puritan painter Hilda, with her home in an airy tower. James wrote to his brother that he hoped his winter of relentless socializing had given him “more impressions” than it seemed, and one of the things he got, which now makes
Roderick Hudson
look dated, was the sense that America’s Italy was no longer what it had been in his precursors’ age. It was no longer the site of artistic devotion, but had instead become a fashionable playground, a stopping point for an international society that moved from place to place and crossed the oceans with the seasons. If Gilbert Osmond were real, he would in his younger days have known such American artists as Story or Hiram Powers; he would have shared his side of the Arno with the Brownings. But not a trace of that appears in Isabel’s world, a world that contains nobody remotely like James himself.

J
ames wrote to Quincy Street in January that the American society he found in Rome seemed
“without relations with the place, or much serious appreciation of it.”
To say that, however, is to beg the question of James’s own relations with the place, and indeed with Europe itself. After he read the Story biography, Henry Adams told him that the book had exposed the ignorance of the world from which they both came, making him
“curl up, like a trodden-on worm. Improvised Europeans, we were, and—Lord God!—How thin.”
Adams took some consolation in the thought that almost nobody would recognize the truth, but James’s own characters had said similar things. The historian’s phrases, however pungent, are simply a version of the standard complaint about “cosmopolites”—the usual thing said about them, said even or especially by themselves. As Ellen Olenska in Wharton’s
Age of Innocence
would later argue,
“It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.”

Of course, Adams’s claim also points to a great paradox. His generation had gone to Europe in search of what they couldn’t find at home, and yet in doing so they were also making a past, a heritage, for us; and at the turn of the twentieth century the intellectual life of Boston and Cambridge, which improvised upon that European legacy, was richer than that of Rome itself. As James himself knew. He knew that America would control the future by annexing the past. It would make its culture by exploiting its freedom to choose, to draw upon the heritage of different lands and centuries, taking a painting here and a philosophy there. Such, at any rate, is the burden of his last great novel,
The Golden Bowl
, which among other things explores the classical motif of the
translatio studii et imperii
, the movement of learning and power from one civilization to another.

Still, the Europe that draws that novel’s ironically named art collector, Adam Verver, isn’t that of the present day. He buys old things, not new; that was what America wanted, what it both lacked and desired. James recognized that his countrymen’s fascination with the past made them ignore Italy’s own preoccupation
“with its economical and political future,”
and yet he too resisted seeing it as a modern state. Some English expatriates, like the Brownings, had identified themselves with the Risorgimento. Most Americans abroad did not, and modernity was precisely what they had come to escape. James came to speak good Italian and to read it with some ease, but he had few Italian friends, and though he had once thought of settling in Italy, his season in Rome persuaded him otherwise. Those months taught him that it was hard to write about a picturesque subject in a picturesque country. The city gave too much. The most intelligent conversation seemed unable to compete with the spectacle of its streets, and James wondered if even so limited an artist as Story might have worked with a “finer rage” in the unfriendlier air of Boston or London. He himself would write better of Italy—would have deeper imaginative relations to it—for not being there, and the most interesting question raised by his January letter to Quincy Street isn’t about any particular place, about Rome or even all of Italy. It is instead the question of the place in his work of place itself.

During her first days in Rome, Isabel finds that the city seems to speak of her own future, and she will later see it as embodying her own psychic state: a place in which people have suffered, and in which
“the ruins of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe.”
Such passages should make us ask if Europe ever stands for James as something more or other than a backdrop against which the dramas of his American characters might play. In what way is it integral, and in what mere scenery? One of the things that fascinated him about Hawthorne was what he called the
“imported”
nature of his sense of sin. Hawthorne certainly knew the world of his Puritan ancestors, but to James he didn’t appear haunted by it. His relation to its almost mystical darkness was an intellectual rather than a moral one, and to James he seemed but to play with its shadows. On this reading, sin becomes an aspect of the picturesque, and indeed James’s language takes on a geographic tinge; he speaks of the “rugged prominence of moral responsibility.” Sin is atmosphere, it is contour and relief. It intensifies the drama, just as Isabel’s sense of her own sadness gains from her awareness of the ever-present Roman past.

Let’s say, then, that James uses Europe in the way he thinks Hawthorne does sin—as color or background, a way to ratchet up the stakes, but not as a part of his work’s deepest being. Yet that claim in itself begs a central question about America’s relation to the rest of the world. In many ways Europe provides as fresh a start for James’s characters as it did for their creator. It lets them appear as though cut off from their pasts. Madame Merle’s native Brooklyn no longer appears to matter, nor Osmond’s Baltimore, and even Isabel’s more significant antecedents dwindle by the page. But in stepping out of America she doesn’t quite step into Europe either, and the bubble life of the expatriate becomes as one with her belief in her own exceptional fate. Her very disconnection from the world around her reinforces her claim that “nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me,” and the American girl’s Europe becomes a place in which one can explore the limits of the self in itself, unbound by the fetters of national origin. It stands as a paradox, offering liberty and history at once; a place in which one’s exemption from history seems to provide a warrant for that liberty. But James’s own Europe is very different from that of his characters, and never more central than when it seems mere background, than when it fosters the illusion of freedom on which Isabel depends.

James drew on his Roman winter for years to come; it gave him both
Roderick Hudson
and the later chapters of the
Portrait
along with a number of short stories. Its most immediate results, however, were the two travel essays he published in the summer of 1873. “A Roman Holiday” purports to offer an account of the annual pre-Lenten Carnival, an event that provides a set piece in almost all touristic descriptions of the city. It is there in Goethe, in Dickens, in Hawthorne—and what’s also there in each of them is an almost ritual sense of disappointment.
This
sorry show is the Carnival, this tired display of masks and confetti and forced hilarity? The festival began that year on the fifteenth of February. It was a Saturday, and James was at his desk in the Hôtel de Rome when a sudden intensification of noise pulled him to his window. He had formed his own idea of Carnival from a children’s book that featured an elegant masked lady on a balcony, but the ladies on the balconies now were all shoveling lime and flour down on to the heads of the pedestrians below, and when he went out himself, James immediately got a pailful dumped upon him. Nothing in this
“dingy drollery”
could match his childhood fantasies, but once he had shaken the flour from his ears, he had a vision of just how empty the rest of the city must be. So he took a holiday from the holiday, wandering away from the festival’s compulsory pleasures and out to the Forum and Santa Maria Maggiore—familiar places, but made fresh by his own sense of escape.

The essay’s most suggestive passage describes a church James doesn’t even name, though he offers precise directions as to how to find it. A little road cuts up the Palatine, running like a country lane between high walls, and then rounds a bend to a pocket-sized, barrel-vaulted church; any good map will give its name as San Bonaventura. Just five minutes’ walk—but it’s still enough, even now, for the city’s bustle to fade out. The church remains so untouristed as to seem forgotten, and on the day I visited, there was only one other person inside, a man sitting in prayer before the high altar. I circled around behind him, walking as softly as I could and trying to make out the paintings on the walls—Caravaggio knockoffs, but so darkened by candle smoke that I couldn’t really see them. On the day James discovered it, he too had found just a solitary worshiper. A young priest was visiting each of the church’s seven altars in turn, and the novelist thought he could hear in the silence the distant bustle of the Carnival itself. The young man’s pale face looked like a judgment on that merriment, and yet his piety came with privations so great that to the writer it appeared
“a terrible game—a gaining one only if your zeal never falters; a hard fight when it does.”
The language James uses here is so charged with both the sense of his own vocation and a knowledge of its price that it makes the priest seem a kind of stand-in, a figure on whom he can place the burden of his own choice.
“I made no vows,”
Wordsworth writes in
The Prelude
as he remembers the moment of his dedication to poetry, “but vows were then made for me,” and James here makes an altar of words before which to renew his own pledge.

A few weeks later he hired one of Mr. Jarrett’s horses in the hope that riding would give him some much-needed exercise, and wrote to Quincy Street of his pleasure in keeping a
“close seat.”
He would leave the city from the Porta del Popolo, heading out across the Campagna, and though he usually rode in company, he depicts himself in “Roman Rides” as traveling alone. The essay stands as his most deliberate attempt to create a picturesque landscape. The remnants of the Claudian Aqueduct along which he rode spoke more of Claude Lorrain than they did of the emperor who built it, and its ruins felt to him as though they were themselves
“the very source of the solitude in which they stand . . . [looming] with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands.”
Such an image belongs to the mind as much as it does to the ground itself, the mind that produces the scenes it expects to find. James did indeed see the Campagna as landscape, not land, looking for the accustomed bits of broken column or a shepherd in the foreground, and his readers will once again think of the Romantics. Only not Wordsworth this time, but rather the Coleridge of “Kubla Khan” and the Shelley of “Ozymandias.”