The Portable Henry James Read Online Free PDF Page B

recent biographical considerations help explain why in the fiction the marriages generally fail, why isolation so often rules, why so much remains unspoken and passions dry up, why an old man urges a young one to live, why a strange spreading syntax shrouds the place, why a baffled little boy is sent home from school, or, why, facing another man in a graveyard, John Marcher repents the shape of his entire life? Yes and no. The reader is permitted and encouraged to ask any questions whatsoever. Yet back when tradition saw Emily Dickinson’s poetry as a retreat from a botched love affair with a gentleman, Allen Tate offered a corrective which still seems sound now that Dickinson is discussed as a lesbian poet: “If we suppose—which is to suppose the improbable—that the love affair precipitated the seclusion, it was only a pretext: she would have found another.”
    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