Whatever the reason Emily Dickinson climbed the stairs and shut the door, James did nothing of the kind. For years he dined out almost every night, and then with friends he traveled through England, France, Italy, the United States, or visited those friends in their grand or middling homes, or wrote to them and they always wrote back—letters marked by devotion. When he turned seventy in 1913, almost three hundred of them pooled their money for a suitable gift, and when John Singer Sargent declined payment for the portrait that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, they used the fund to buy a golden bowl. When the next year a suffragette entered the Royal Academy and—with a meat cleaver—attacked the painting, 390 well-wishers sent letters of condolence to a friend who admitted he felt “scalped and disfigured.” At the death of Henry James in 1916, Logan Pearsall Smith wrote of the loss of a great and remote man:
I feel as if a great cathedral had disappeared from the skyline, a great country with all its civilization been wiped from the map, a planet lost to the solar system. Things will happen and he won’t be there to tell them to, and the world will be a poorer and more meagre place. We shall all miss the charm and danger of our relationship with the dear elusive man, the affectionate and wonderful talks, the charming letters, the icy and sad intervals, the way he kept us all allured and aloof, and shone on us, and hid his light, like a great variable but constant moon.
And in spite of the long-standing affection of many friends, the response was startling when in 1900 Morton Fullerton apparently asked James about that figure in the carpet:
I wish I could help you, for instance, by satisfying your desire to know from “what port,” as you say, I set out. And yet, though the enquiry is, somehow, of so large a synthesis, I think I
can
in a manner answer. The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the
essential loneliness of my life
—and it seems to be the port also, in sooth to which my course again finally directs itself! This loneliness, (since I mention it!)—what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper about
me,
at any rate, than anything else: deeper than my “genius,” deeper than my “discipline,” deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counter-mining of art.
Finally one comes back to this gray lumbering thing that James claimed for himself and a little for everyone. It may have been that his loneliness—such persistent alienation, separation, and remoteness, whether at home or abroad, in his fiction or in his private life—was the fruit of a blighted sexuality that kept intimacy at bay while it let regrets mount and mount. But then again, Chekhov said that if you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry, and so perhaps the explanation should go further.
Perhaps the marginalization was idiosyncratic to a singular man born in 1843 into an uncommon family on Washington Place in New York City, with a kind mother named Mary and a one-legged philosopher-father who once saw a ghost hunch down in a room. That father—who had been a friend of both Emerson and Carlyle—so despised pedantry that he kept all five children constantly on the move, from one teacher to another and from one school to another, so that their minds would never fix on any “inhumanity of Method.” Before he was twelve, Henry had gone through seven schools in New York alone, and years later he would recall how, during a particularly volatile stretch, he and his siblings “had been to my particular consciousness virtually in motion.” But the father went further than that, and would move them from one town, from one country, from one continent and one language to another—“our rootless & accidental childhood,” his sister would later complain—with transitory homes in New York, Albany, Boston, Newport, and Cambridge, but also in Geneva, London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Bonn. The James children got a deep experience of European organicism and European repose—but they got it odd, bit by bit, and always on the road. So William James may have known best when he said his brother was “a native of the James family, and has no other country.”
But even William James was mostly wrong, for in fact his brother was above all an American, and he had deeply American habits—as when in youth he left his entire family behind and crossed the Atlantic to go it alone. It is useful to recall that when Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States, he saw a distinguished future for a remarkable people, but he also suspected a somber potential beyond anything the founding fathers had conceived. Here was a people and here was a nation where every connection, every link, was being challenged, and where, as he wrote in 1840, the
. . . woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one has any idea. . . . [The Americans] acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands.
Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.
Therefore it may have been a blood and bone American isolation that was felt by the expatriate Henry James when he sat on the Riva degli Schiavoni or walked on the Rue de Rivoli. And it may also have been a doggedly American isolation that marks the fiction’s independent, rather parentless, vaguely childless people who rarely stay home but keep on the move or at least remain strangely unsettled. Long before Henry James—even before Bartleby turned inward or Hawthorne’s minister lowered his black veil—perhaps de Tocqueville was right after all when he wondered if American democracy might not be creating a new kind of human being.
V.
By the turn of the century, art had begun to look suspiciously like religion. Spiritual enough to satisfy languishing needs, it had an esoteric and holy vocabulary, an ancient tradition, a long novitiate, a priesthood jealous of its power, a rule of inspiration, and a pattern of grace. With its meditative isolation and its searching mystic moments, it knew it was vaguely larger than itself and it promised greater things. In our obscurely spiritual Western culture, it still does. Its cathedrals—the magnificent museums of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, and James’s own fictional “American City”—had suddenly rent the surface of the earth and risen to cast sublime shadows, and on Sundays the congregations always came. Although James was not alone in turning to art for what might still give life dignity, grace, and shape, he may have taken art’s promise further than anyone else. At the very least, as Blackmur recognized, James honored the “sacred rage of his art as the only spirit he could fully serve.”
He served it well and produced an impressive body of work—thirty-five volumes in the most inclusive posthumous edition of his fiction. “Nothing could be allowed to interfere for long with the labour from which he never rested,” his secretary eventually recalled, “except perhaps during sleep.” But the fiction itself was not enough and neither was it enough that he revised the work of his youth and “matured” those books, making them right, with countless touches that were fine, and then finer. His sacred rage took him further than that and led him to brood on all that he had done before, and then from 1907 to 1909, in the prefaces to his
New York Edition,
he described his own fiction and then the genre of fiction itself, which he took more seriously than anyone ever had. He presented the novel—so often in his time considered a mere entertainment—as a genuine art form that could be as rich as painting and as hard as marble. Convinced “that the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms,” he avoided talk of inspired magic, or of a poet who has drunk the milk of paradise, and instead presented a mastery entirely unrelated to any galvanizing glance of the Muse. The prefaces may seem like tracts of a new theology, but above all they work—as the first preface introduces his subject—at the demystification of art and the clearing up of the “rich, ambiguous aesthetic air.”
These prefaces discuss the practical problems the writer faces in making a novel. They are about craft. They talk of the “novelist’s process,” his “system of observation,” the “literary arrangement,” the “constructional game,” the “steps taken and obstacles mastered,” the “thousand lures and deceits,” the “points of view,” the tricks, mistakes, shortcuts, and inventions, and ultimately how the refining novelist must, hardheadedly, “boil down so many facts in the alembic, so that the distilled result, the produced appearance, should have intensity, lucidity, brevity, beauty.” As James elucidates fiction’s exacting requirements, he presents the novelist much like the painter who knows the laws of perspective: “I have ever failed,” he writes, “to see how a coherent picture of anything is producible save by a complex of fine measurements.” He judges his own fiction technically and artistically, which is to say aesthetically. And it is only incidental that, in the critical prefaces at least, James comments on anything political, psychological, biographical, or even moral. It is art and art alone that takes the field. It is art and art alone that sweeps the horizon.
Some said that for James the real world had been replaced by a highly artificial one, a fascinating and complex architectonic structure, but one that existed apart, and was far removed from the heat of the day. When H. G. Wells led the “painful hippopotamus” through his parody, he suggested as much, but then he turned mean: “And the elaborate copious emptiness of the whole Henry James exploit is only redeemed and made endurable by the elaborate copious wit.” In a surprisingly courteous response, the seventy-two-year-old James defended his mix of art and life: “I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my kind of expression of that.” Then Wells wrote back, churlishly, about his own “horror of dignity, finish and perfection. . . . To you literature like painting is an end, to me literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. . . . I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.” At such apostasy James finally lost patience:
Meanwhile I absolutely dissent from the claim that there are any differences whatever in the amenability to art of forms of literature aesthetically determined, and hold your distinction between a form that is (like) painting and a form that is (like) architecture for wholly null and void. There is no sense in which architecture is aesthetically “for use” that doesn’t leave any other art whatever exactly as much so; and so far as literature being irrelevant to the literary report upon life, and to its being made as interesting as possible, I regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. It is art that
makes
life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
It is an astonishing claim. James does not suggest that art explores or deepens life, and neither does he say that art exists for its own sake. Art
makes
life and
makes
importance, and with such an assertion the ordinary way of the world—so rich and easy in its gorgeous formlessness—becomes a hazy, dubious, second-best thing. Here it is art and only art that might touch the world with a consecrated hand and make it live, while the world—as beautiful, languid, and as heavy as Michelangelo’s Adam—just waits.
But James understood that when “life” moves onto a subordinate plain, there can be trouble—for the artist, for the writer, even for the reader—and so an elusive balance preoccupies the fiction. As far back as “The Madonna of the Future,” an equivocating painter wastes both all his life and all his art, and in
Roderick Hudson
a beautiful woman lures a sculptor away from his sacred rage—and everything collapses. When, in “The Lesson of the Master,” the acolyte asks if “the artist shouldn’t marry,” the Master says he “does so at his peril—he does so at his cost.” But then the Master himself marries and the lesson becomes uncertain.
As he was about to grow old, James broadened the question and weighed the more general life of the mind against the more frankly active life, which in the late fiction often becomes the more frankly sexual life. Vaguely artistic but definitely contemplative people in
The Ambassadors,
in “The Beast in the Jungle,” and in “The Jolly Corner” eventually ask if they have failed “to live,” and late in life each has a moment of blasting regret. If, a year before he died and under biting attack from Wells, James denied any anxiety concerning the schism between art’s “sacred hardness” and the scramble of “real” life, he had in fact often troubled over the disquieting split: “Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection.” When, in the 1892 “The Real Thing,” a book illustrator of an
“édition de luxe”
uses a real gentleman and a real lady as models for images of the upper class, the sketches turn out “execrable.” But when an Italian orangemonger and a vulgar Cockney named Miss Churm (“She couldn’t spell, and she loved beer”) pose as such grand people, the “alchemy of art” succeeds, and the illustrations turn out fine. The real thing, whatever that is.
Although there is no question about it—for Henry James art offered the best chance for some kind of supreme achievement—he would still question art itself. For centuries its myriad images had been dragged down every gleaming hall and then jammed up high on the altars right next to God, and so art had grown spoiled and soft. But things were different now and now art had to fight for its place. James provided his interrogation—in his fiction and in his criticism—just as the twentieth century was about to ask hard questions about art’s value and art’s claim to truth. James knew that if it was to remain important—and it may no longer be important today—art needed to be challenged and fostered, repelled and embraced, and made generally tougher, and that is what he did. Over a long career he grappled with it and tested it—aesthetically, morally, and pragmatically—with great intelligence and with something that became increasingly rare after his death: a complete lack of cant.