When I told a friend I was writing a novel set in nineteenth-century Venice, he raised an eyebrow: my previous novel and collections of short stories all had contemporary settings. When I told him that Henry James was one of the main characters, he frowned. Real people, said he, are nothing but trouble.
However, of the many difficulties he proceeded to outline – including having some academic find fault with your portrayal of the real-life figures – being haunted by them was one he neglected to mention.
And I don’t mean being haunted in an allegorical sense: becoming obsessed with the people you are researching – though “obsessed” is an interesting word too. I am reminded here of the first time I read James’s spooky short story The Jolly Corner. The narrator has returned to New York to the now empty mansion he has inherited, and while staying in a nearby gentleman’s club, he gets into the habit of wandering around the house at night, wondering how his life would have turned out had he stayed in New York and not gone off to Europe. There is obviously something ghostly happening, but, as a good literary theorist, I contented myself with understanding the “ghost” in question as a metaphor for what might have been, for doomed youth ... until the night he is wending his way back down through the house and he notices a door closed, which he knows had been open moments before. And of course he just has to go over and reach for the handle, as opposed to taking the stairs two at a time and haring straight out the front door, which would have been my choice of action.
Unfortunately, I also do not mean being haunted by Henry James. I don’t think I would have minded this so much; it would have had a sort of Dante/Virgil vibe. No; I refer to poor Constance Fenimore Woolson, the lady whose gowns James “drowns” in the Venetian lagoon, giving rise to the title of my novel. This is/was a real-life person. Did I have any right appropriating her real-life (?) death, probably through suicide, as a narrative device? Where was the decency in conjuring her apparition in the novel?
My conscience was troubled.
I was not worried about using James. Henry James might not currently be widely read, but he is widely written. There is no shortage of fictitious Jameses. Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author to name but two. James’s reputation can withstand any of our attentions; Fenimore Woolson, quite a successful writer in her own time but less little known now. Put it this way: it’s the difference between the Match of the Day pundits slagging off Zlatan Ibrahimovic or Jürgen Klopp and The Sunday Game panel criticising some poor under-21 who has just made his Championship debut in the senior team in Croker.
I knew I was in trouble the night I woke up and the sight of my wife’s dress hanging on the outside of the wardrobe startled me. I had just written the scene where my protagonist, Reuben Ross, hears for the first time the swish of a gown in his bed chamber; when he lights a lantern there is no one there. Another night, awaking from a bad dream, I had to get out and shut over the same wardrobe’s door to avoid seeing the garments suspended within. Another time, my own white work shirt, airing from the picture rail and spectral in the street lighting coming through the blinds, gave me a jolt. Some appeasing had to be done.
First, I decided not to use her name (this in part explains why HJ himself is only named near the end). Her identity is alluded to – her family connection to James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans, is hinted at. Secondly, the lady herself seemed to believe in the supernatural; the mysterious book that James finds among her belongings, The Law of Physic Phenomenon, existed and does maintain that clothes have souls. I thought she would understand my use of her gowns.
Finally, I followed the lesson of the Master. James had no qualms recycling the memory of those who were dear to him but who had passed on. Does not his beloved cousin Mary (Minny) Temple, dead at 24, reappear to varying degrees as Isabel Archer or Milly Theale? In September 1894, writing in Constance’s room, James said: “He cherishes for the silent dead, a tenderness in which all his private need finds a sacred, and almost secret, expression.”
For my part, the next time I am in Venice, I will enter one of the dark, damp churches such as the one visited by James and Reuben in my novel and light there a candle for Constance.
Peter Hollywood’s latest novel is Drowning the Gowns (New Island)
