Essay: Henry James is the subject of Colm Tóibín's new novel, in which the American writer's women friends loom tragically and large
In his memoirs, Henry James wrote about several weeks in the golden summer of 1865, when he was 22, which were spent in the company of his cousins, the Temple girls, and two young veterans of the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr and John Grey, both to become distinguished lawyers. If he needed to know about love triangles, the power of the unspoken, New England reticence and pride, male certainty and hardness and the astonishing optimism and intellectual curiosity of the women in the company, then he needed nothing more than these three weeks. He was free to study his cousin, Minny Temple, in all her grace and brightness, her "splendid, shifting sensibility" and her longing for life. Those weeks, he wrote, when recalled, had "the force for me of a wizard's wand".
By that summer of 1865, James had published two short stories and a number of reviews. The second of these stories was a love story set during the American Civil War in which he, as the narrator, stated what was to be his own pure, stern policy as an artist. His hero was Lieutenant Ford. "I have no intention of following Lieutenant Ford to the seat of war. The exploits of his campaign are recorded in the public journals of the day, where the curious may still peruse them. My own taste has always been for unwritten history and my present business is with the reverse of the picture."
Now, as he watched his two friends fall in love with Minny his cousin, he stood back and watched. Later he wrote to his brother: "Every one was supposed I believe to be more or less in love with her: others may answer for themselves: I never was and yet I had the great satisfaction that I enjoyed pleasing her almost as much as if I had been. I cared more to please her perhaps than she ever cared to be pleased."
Having observed the scene that summer, he set to work, painting his first of many portraits of his cousin, or perhaps more accurately, using the aspects of her temperament and her fate which suited his ruthless and highly-wrought purpose. He published 'Poor Richard', his longest story to date, in 1867. It dealt with Gertrude Whittaker, an orphan like Minny Temple, besieged by three men, two confident civil war veterans and a third, poor Richard, helpless and frustrated.
By the time the story appeared, Minny Temple was dying of tuberculosis. In his letters to his mother and brother about her death written from England, James, shocked and grief-stricken, also saw how difficult marriage and domestic life might have been for a woman of such independence, ambition and glittering intelligence. And thus the seeds began to grow for his novel, The Portrait of a Lady. Minny had longed to travel, especially to England and Italy. He could now, in his fiction, take her there. He had made Gertrude Whittaker an heiress; now he could also give Minny, who had been penniless in life, a fortune. He could furnish her with the same three admirers, one to watch her closely, as he himself had done, and two to court her assiduously and unsuccessfully, as his two friends had done. He placed her at the beginning of the novel in the old rooms in Albany which had belonged to their grandmother. And he married her to a man who bore an astonishing physical resemblance to his friend Francis Boott in Florence who, indeed, inhabited the same rooms on Bellosguardo outside the city with his only daughter as did the man his heroine was to marry who also had an only daughter.
In the end, James was more interested in pattern and form than he was in mere anecdote or character; the novel for him was a cathedral rather than a domestic space. In a reply to his friend, Grace Norton, who had noticed the use of Minny Temple, he wrote: "You are both right and wrong about Minny Temple. I had her in mind and there is in the heroine a considerable infusion of my impression of her remarkable nature. But the thing is not a portrait. Poor Minny was essentially incomplete and I have attempted to make my young woman more rounded, more finished. In truth everyone, in life, is incomplete, and it is \ the work of art that in reproducing them one feels the desire to fill them out, to justify them, as it were".
James's creation of an American woman of sensitivity and intelligence taking in Europe was further complicated, however, by the presence in Florence when he was writing the book of the American novelist, Constance Fenimore Woolson, who travelled with a letter of introduction to him. They viewed the city together, visiting places which were new to her but deeply familiar to him. He loved the freshness of her response, how self-contained and serious she was, how ambitious. He also, of course, was interested in the fact that she was the grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper. Fenimore, as he learned to call her, who was a number of years older than him, became his closest friend as well as one of his best kept secrets. In his family, only his sister, Alice, suspected the closeness of the relationship, writing to William, her brother, to say that Henry was malingering on the continent with "a she-novelist".
James wrote most of The Aspern Papers (1888) in the ground floor of Constance's house above Florence. In the story, a woman in possession of precious manuscripts of an early American writer seeks marriage in exchange for the papers. Constance did not seek marriage, but she sought a loyalty and attention from him which he did not feel free always to give.
She was surprised, when he finally introduced her to Francis Boott and his daughter in Florence, at how close in detail Boott and his house and his daughter were to The Portrait of a Lady. She wondered if she herself would have some future role in James's fiction. Almost 20 years later, James came to write The Golden Bowl (1904) in which a patrician American in Europe (which Boott certainly was) finds on his only daughter's marriage that he should marry too. The novel deals with the dramatic machinations and dissimulations between the two couples.
In the real world, James had introduced Constance to Boott just when Boott's daughter, Lizzie, had married. He then left the two couples in Florence and went back to England. Constance never married Boott, but that was life. James was interested in art, which takes root in life but grows in the imagination. He never had the slightest hesitation about using his friends and family in his fiction with the steely purpose of studying the reverse of the picture, making them more complete. His sister, Alice, found this to her cost when she read The Princess Casamassima (1886) and noticed how close the much-disliked Rosie Munniment was to her dear self. She remained silent on the subject.
Both Minny and Constance were to be further completed in James's later work. He brought Minny back to life more than 30 years after her death as the dying Millie Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902), an American longing for life; James gave her another fortune, which would also destroy her. In The Ambassadors (1903), he dramatised his meetings with "she-novelist" Constance Fenimore Woolson in the relationship between Strether and Maria Gostrey.
Much of this is surface detail and easy to detect. More slippery and evasive is why James was so fascinated by guilt, by a secret which will be explosive if revealed, by the grey lines which divide right and wrong and, finally, by sheer evil. It is far too easy to suggest that his homosexuality was at the root of some of this, or was its cause. The fact that he was blamed by some of his contemporaries for the deaths of both Minny and Constance, a blame which he refused publicly to accept, may have entered his spirit, however, in some fundamental way. Minny, as she was ill, had asked him to take her to Italy. As her cousin, he could have easily agreed. He went alone leaving her in damp New England. Aquarter of a century later, he was blamed for leaving Constance stricken and depressed in the harsh winter in Venice, refusing to communicate with her, and thus contributing to her motives for suicide. She jumped from a second-story window and was killed.
The business of secrecy and guilt did not affect all of James's relationships with women; his friends, with whom he was on easy and familiar terms, included the actress, Fanny Kemble, and novelists Edith Wharton and Mrs Humphrey Ward. Nonetheless, he took care all his life to censor what others knew about him. Part of his reason for disliking Oscar Wilde so poisonously, for example, was not only Wilde's flaunting his homosexuality, or something like it, in London, but Wilde's flaunting of his Irishness.
James, in his late 60s, as he wrote his memoirs, sought to claim some English blood on his grandmother's side. But he, in fact, had none. His four grandparents were of Ulster Presbyterian origin, his millionaire grandfather, William James, was born in Bailieborough, Co Cavan. In general, in letters and essays and even in his fiction, James had nothing good to say about Ireland. While his sister, Alice, was a staunch Home Ruler, he remained opposed to the Irish cause. He came to the country three times: first, in 1882, travelling from Cobh to Dublin on his way back from the US; then in 1891 he stayed at the Royal Marine Hotel, in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, where he wrote two short stories.
His last visit to Ireland, in 1895, tells us most about his position in English society. He stayed one week in Dublin Castle with the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Houghton, whose father had also been a friend, and one week with his old friends, Lord and Lady Wolseley, at the Royal Hospital, in Kilmainham, now the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Lord Wolseley was the commander of Her Majesty's forces in Ireland. His wife was a great collector and hostess; she held a grand fancy-dress ball at the hospital in March 1895, which James attended, although he refused to dress up. Lady Wolseley believed that the figure of Mrs Gereth in The Spoils of Poynton, written two years later, was based on her, but that did not prevent her helping James to furnish Lamb House in Rye which he began to lease in 1897.
Aspects of James's appeal for the English were his good manners and his American origin. No one could quite tell who he was, in a society where only outsiders were allowed this freedom and accepted at the tables of Lord Houghton and Lady Wolseley. It must have been strange for James sitting there with the cream of the English aristocracy, about their business in Ireland, knowing how hard it would be to explain Ulster Presbyterianism to them. He had come a long way. Like most things, it unsettled him and he remained silent on the subject. He saved his words for the art of fiction.
• Colm Tóibín's novel, The Master, which is based on Henry James, will be published next month by Picador