In one of his earlier notes was a list of possible names for the eponymous character in this play about the lone scion of a wealthy family being called back from a monastery to choose between Holy Orders and continuing his family’s name through marriage and children. James also had the original notes he’d made years earlier in Venice after hearing an anecdote about the apprentice monk who had been forced to renounce either his family’s continuance or his holy vows. At the time he’d thought it might develop into a short story and had given it the tentative title “The Hero”:
Situation of that once-upon-a-time member of an old Venetian family (I forget which), who had become a monk, & who was taken almost forcibly out of his convent & brought back into the world in order to keep the family from becoming extinct . . . —it was absolutely necessary for him to marry.
James had long ago abandoned The Hero as the title of the play version of this tale, had added several extra dramatic—perhaps melodramatic—layers to the basic decision the hero had to make, and decided that amongst all these possible names for his hero, names filling two full pages in one of the thin notebooks he’d brought with him, he had liked “Domville” the best. It had taken him longer to come up with the eponymous leading character’s first name—at one time he’d toyed with “Boy” just because he liked the sound of it—but for the last few months it had solidified into “Guy”. Guy Domville. Obviously this was no longer a play set in Venice.
But would the male—and very masculine—protagonist’s heroic act consist of consenting to a loveless marriage (a marriage into which a villain with the villainous name of Devenish was trying to ensnare Guy Domville) or would his character resist this temptation and renounce life, love, family, and any future for his noble family’s name by returning to Holy Orders and cold celibacy?
Lying there in John Hay’s guest room in the near-darkness, the small pool of light from his bedside lamp illuminating only his pale hands and the small pile of his notebooks, James imagined that the double-renunciation at the end of the play would bring tears to sensitive souls in the audience. He could imagine his elaborately dressed actor saying loudly—“I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles!” Everyone in the theater would either weep or be struck into awed silence.
But would they?
James felt like weeping. He wished Sherlock Holmes would return.
* * *
On the next day, Saturday morning, precisely one week before his dreaded birthday, having just finished breakfast—Gregory had whisked the tray away with his usual silent efficiency when James had rung the little bell—and dressed in his finely tailored brown pinstripe suit and waistcoat, Henry James sat in the spring sunlight at the table near the open window of his wonderful guest suite and wrote the following:
Among the delays, the disappointments, the déboires of the horrid theatric trade nothing is so soothing as to remember that literature sits patient at my door, and that I have only to lift the latch to let in the exquisite little form that is, after all, nearest to my heart and with which I am so far from having done. I let it in, the old brave hours come back; I live them over again—I add another little block to the small literary monument that it has been given to me to erect.
James paused and looked at what he had just written. It was hogwash. Sentimental hogwash. He had committed himself to making his fortune writing for the theater and there was no little latch he could lift that would let his cozy—and financially unrewarding—literary efforts come tip-toeing back in.
And what was this self-serving babble about building a “small literary monument” for himself, block by block? Flaubert had answered that conceit rather concisely with his comment—“Books are made not like children but like pyramids and they’re just as useless. And they stay in the desert. Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.”
Henry James would soon turn fifty and while he’d sown his literary wild oats with both abandon and determined discipline, at this dark moment he doubted very much if any of his literary children would outlive him. At least by not much more than a few years at best.
Even his attempts to get his peers—or at least his younger literature-oriented male friends—to call him “Master”—Maître—had failed. If they did so, at his actual urgings, they made it into something like a joke. No, there was no “literary monument” out there for him or of him, no monument built “block by block” by his patient workmanship. And for the temporary “monuments” he’d labored so hard to construct, the critic-jackals were indeed pissing on them, the tiresome bourgeois—especially in America—clambering over his blocks and scratching their initials in his oh-so-carefully-cut stones with nails and knives.
Just last year he’d written a story he’d very much liked titled “The Wheel of Time”. In it his main character, yet another reflection of himself as seen through a glass darkly, thinks much about his distant youth while musing on his forty-ninth birthday. About youth . . .
He regretted it, he missed it, he tried to beckon it back; but the differences in London made him feel that it had gone forever. There might perhaps be some compensation in being fifty, some turn of the dim telescope, some view from the brow of the hill; it was a round, gross, stupid number, which probably would make one pompous, make one think one’s self venerable. Meanwhile, at any rate, it was odious to be forty-nine.
But with that round, odious number of 50 now bearing down on him like a freight train in the night—just as impervious, just as terrifying, just as unavoidable—he would pay anything to remain forty-nine forever or, if that was not possible, at least for another few un-passing years.
James realized to his horror that he was close to tears. Maybe that young, pink American pig named Teddy Roosevelt had been right; perhaps he was effeminate in his thoughts and writings.
* * *
James was aching to write someone a letter. But he couldn’t, shouldn’t . . . this trip to America was to remain a secret from his friends and epistolary interlocutors.
More hogwash. He was a man of letters in more than the literary sense. Henry James wrote a letter to someone, usually multiple letters to multiple someones, every day of his life. In a real sense, writing and receiving letters was the way he kept in touch with life.
At the moment he felt an overwhelming need to write a letter to Constance Fenimore Woolson about what had happened to him over the past few weeks. He knew that Fenimore had turned fifty-three last month in March—he’d written her a clever letter offering his elliptical birthday wishes—so she might understand his feelings about turning fifty. To his recollection, they’d never discussed the topic of aging. Fenimore—an American writer like James, in self-exile in Europe for decades—was the focus of the closest thing to a romantic relationship with a woman that James had ever felt or allowed.
Of course, he really had no romantic notions about Fenimore, certainly no sensual or sexual ones—the thought of an unclad woman’s body appealed to him only in a very few classical paintings and sculptures. It was the nude male form that moved James in some deep, solid, but uncertain way—ever since that day he walked into his brother William’s Newport art group’s life-drawing class and saw their cousin Gus standing there naked as the model. But at one point, for weeks when both of them were staying in Fenimore’s rented chalet of Bellosguardo high above Venice, Fenimore in her rooms upstairs and James comfortably in his apartment on the lowest floor, he’d had some sense of what it might be like to live with a woman.
To be married.
Of course Fenimore was so masculine in so many ways—fiercely independent, achingly but muscularly ambitious as a writer and poet in her own right, willing to break off even the most delightful conversation with James while sitting on the wide terrace of the Villa Brichieri near Bellosguardo watching a sunset in order to get back to her writing—but she was also a woman with a woman’s mysteries. It had taken James months after Fenimore had left her leased home in Oxford before he realized that she’d come there??
?to the winter darkness of England which depressed her so, she needed sunlight or her moods would plummet—to be near him while his sister Alice was dying.
Near him. He’d taken her melancholic presence for granted while it was there for so many months. Only when she left Oxford, in something like exasperation if not outright anger, did he notice her by her absence.
Fenimore could be cast in fiction as an amusing eccentric, made more amusing by her hearing problem that she would not acknowledge and which made real conversation all the more difficult, especially in a salon or crowded public place. But James knew that she was no more eccentric than he. Almost certainly less so. At least Fenimore, as far as he knew, was holding no secret at the core of her being.
He had realized the previous year, just as Fenimore was leaving for Switzerland and then Italy again while showing more asperity toward him than ever before, not only that she’d moved to Oxford for all that time to be near him to offer her support during the last months of his sister’s life but that, with Alice now gone, perhaps she had expected more attention from James.
They’d often agreed to meet in European cities and even English towns, rigorously staying in separate hotels, but meeting for walks and dinners together and tours of art galleries or the occasional concert, which Fenimore enjoyed in spite of her hearing problem. Could she possibly have expected more than this?
Could it be possible that she was in love with him?
James had assiduously avoided being seen with her when mutual friends were about. They met in out-of-the-way towns, dined in hotels and restaurants which were nice enough but in which James was close to certain he’d never find any of his friends. He was not ashamed of or embarrassed by her, per se, since Constance Fenimore Woolson was one of the more interesting and sophisticated American writers he knew in Europe. He was, he acknowledged now, simply terrified that a third party would think what sister Alice had, on more than one occasion, written flippantly to William or someone else in his family—“Oh, Harry. He’s off flirting with Fenimore Woolson on the Continent.”
He allowed his dying sister to make such jokes. Having anyone else he knew do so, even—especially—his brother William, would devastate him.
But he had lived with Fenimore in Bellosguardo, lived with her after a fashion and by her terms, comfortable in their strangely similar and formal fellow-bachelors-devoted-to-their-work way, and those weeks had changed him somehow. Mostly, it had made Henry James realize how terribly, terribly lonely he was.
A year ago, in May of 1892, just a month after his forty-ninth birthday, James had visited Fenimore while she was packing to leave Oxford and then gone straight home to write a passage in his unfolding story “The Wheel of Time”. In his story, the 49-year-old main character Maurice Glanvil had, in his twenties, rejected the plain-looking but secretly charming lady friend Fanny Knocker, only to meet her again on the Continent decades later. Maurice’s wife had died, leaving him with few memories of actual love and a rather plain-looking daughter.
When 49-year-old Maurice meets Fanny again, now the widowed Mrs. Tregent, he sees to his astonishment that she has grown into that rare sort of beauty which reaches its apex only in middle age. And she has had a son—a strikingly handsome and dashing son just a little bit older than Maurice’s rather plain and ordinary daughter.
In the story, Fanny’s son repeats Maurice’s earlier betrayal of young Fanny Knocker by rejecting his daughter’s hopes of marriage despite both his and Mrs. Tregent’s efforts to make the match. Maurice’s daughter was simply too plain for the handsome youth.
But the real shock of the story occurs when Maurice learns that he—Maurice—had been the secret passion in Fanny Knocker Tregent’s life for all these years. A love undeclared. Unrealized. But central to her life.
That day in May a year ago, after visiting the strangely irritated and rapidly departing Fenimore, James had gone straight home and written this scene where Maurice is meditating on this unknown passion, a discovery that makes “his pleasure almost as great as his wonder”.
She had striven, she had accepted, she had conformed; but she had thought of him every day of her life. She had taken up duties and performed them, she had banished every weakness and practiced every virtue; but the still hidden flame had never been quenched. His image had interposed, his reality had remained, and she had never denied herself the sweetness of hoping that she would see him again and that she would know him. She had never raised a little finger for it, but fortune had answered her prayer. Women were capable of these mysteries of sentiment, these intensities of fidelity, and there were moments in which Maurice Glanvil’s heart beat strangely before a vision really so sublime. He seemed to understand now by what miracle Fanny Knocker had been beautified—the miracle of heroic docilities and accepted pangs and vanquished egotisms. It had never come in a night, but it had come by living for others. She was living for others still; it was impossible for him to see anything else at last than that she was living for him. The time of passion was over, but the time of service was long.
He had written that scene—published that story—all while smugly and secretly (even to himself) knowing that he was writing about Constance Fenimore Woolson’s long unstated passion for him. He hadn’t fully admitted the power of that connection even to himself last year, but he saw it now.
And he also saw, with his gorge rising in horror, that he might have been writing that passage about himself. About his unacknowledged, never recognized need—not for love, not for passion, never for desire, but still basic and compelling need—for Fenimore to be in his life, to be in his life to relieve his terrible burden of loneliness, to encompass him with her almost masculine understanding and yet persistently feminine presence.
Dear God, thought Henry James on this Saturday morning a week before his fiftieth birthday, I have to get out of here, away from here.
He would go to Boston to leave Alice’s ashes in the marble urn on her grave where Miss Loring had set to rest the majority of Alice’s cremated remains. Then he would go home. Home to England.
One thing was now certain: with Sherlock Holmes gone from his life, the question Holmes had raised as to whether he was real or a fictional character—thus making Henry James an adjunct fictional character if he were merely being used in a work of fiction as Holmes’s Dr. Watson–like assistant made to marvel at Holmes’s powers of deduction—was moot. With Holmes gone, doing whatever he was doing wherever he was doing it, Henry James had returned to being just a living, breathing human being. Albeit a powerfully gifted and talented one.
* * *
There was a rapid knock at his door, James said “Enter” without thinking, and Clara Hay fairly danced into the room.
“You must see this, Harry, you simply must!” she cried, as giddy as a girl. She caught his left hand in both of hers and all but lifted him bodily up and out of his chair.
She led the amazed author to the door. “No need for your coat, Harry. It’s as warm as a summer’s day outside. And it’s only a few steps. You simply must see this! It’s too wonderful to miss.”
“See what?” managed James as they hurried down the broad central staircase toward where Benson held the front door open for them.
“The Flying Vernettis!”
* * *
The crowd had gathered on the green grass of Lafayette Square Park and were looking up at what Clara reminded him was the Camerons’ huge house. James saw Lizzie Cameron near the front of the crowd (but not her husband, Don, of course—he would be at work), shading her eyes with her hand so that she could see better. James noticed other high-society neighbors, mostly matrons, of the Hays’ and Adamses’ and Camerons’ neighborhood gathered near the east side of the park while more common folk, including some street workers still with their brooms, stood back a bit. Some of the society women—James saw young Helen Hay—were using opera glasses the better to see.
But everyone was looking upward. Clara pointed. James shielded his own eyes an
d tried to find what they were all gawking at.
There. Along the highest roofline of the huge, steeply roofed house, a man and a boy were walking with exaggerated high steps, crossing the dangerous distance between one cluster of chimney pots and another. The man had a sort of quiver strapped to his back and from that vessel rose various brushes and strangely apportioned brooms.
“Chimney sweeps?” said James, astonished that Clara had dragged him out into the hot sunlight for mere chimney sweeps.
“Watch!” cried Clara Hay.
James saw that there might be some tension in watching the man and boy move carefully along that high, narrow roof beam, since they were almost sixty feet up and the Camerons’ roof was far too steep to stop their fall if either one slipped.
Suddenly James and the crowd gasped as the boy did a forward cartwheel on the narrow ridge and the man, letting the quiver dangle by its strap so the brushes would not fall, did a handstand behind the boy, his hands on the slippery slate slabs on either side of the apex.
The two were odd-looking creatures. Both man and boy—he might have been eleven or twelve, no older—were rail thin and dressed in black sweeps’ clothing that seemed several sizes too small for each of them. That was a deliberate effect, James noticed, since the socks and shirts protruding from the cuffs were red-and-black striped for the skinny man and green-and-black striped for the boy.
The strangeness was enhanced by the fact that the grown chimney sweep had orange hair spiked up into a column, rather like a Mohawk Indian’s vertical queue, while the boy’s spiky hair, stabbing out in all directions, had been dyed a bright, Kendal green. The man’s face had been painted white—a skull—and the eyes were lost to sight in black paint. The boy’s face was painted all white save for the narrowest strip of red on his thin lips. The effect—at least for James—was disturbing.