Portrait of Two Women

...She says flatly that Woolson was no more capable than James was of sustaining an intimate commitment...

...count as a young and shining apparition, a creature who owed to the charm of her every aspect (her aspects were so many...

...A good number of men who fought," she says, "were no more robust" than either of the elder James boys...

...She was a writer of some reputation when in 1879 she sought out James in Europe, presumably—but even this is in doubt—because she admired his talent...

...If so, instead of being the novel's victim, she emerges as a manipulator of the other characters, an interpretation at odds with Gordon's findings...

...In any event, he discreetly refused...

...Reviewed by Marcus Klein Professor emeritus of English, SUNY/Buffalo...

...Woolson suffered all of her life from depression...

...associate editor, "American National Biography·" Boy, does Lyndall Gordon ever have it in for Henry James...

...That January she had reviewed The Europeans, criticizing it for its lack of action...

...Everyone, not least James himself, has dealt with the fact that neither he nor his elder brother, William, served in the Civil War, while their younger brothers did and suffered...

...and the originality, vivacity, audacity, generosity, of her spirit, an indescribable grace and weight—if one might impute weight to a being so imponderable in common scales...

...She is also very sick, and will die young, and has Minnie's initials...

...Gordon is more apt to address the work when it reflects her concerns, and in agreement with general opinion she finds Minnie Temple in Milly Theale of The Wings of the Dove...

...it is life that is the unconscious, the agitated, the struggling, floundering cause...

...The little girl Maisie, at the end tries to seduce her mother's lover, la Spoils a disinherited mother makes a surrogate of a poor spinster for the purpose of seducing her son, who is no great prize...

...In The Awkward Age the young girl submits to a fine old gentleman who might be her grandfather...

...Nevertheless, fiction, James went on, with particular reference to writing about the Brontes, is not simply an orderly reflection of life: "The fashion has been so to confound the cause with the result that we cease to know, in the presence of such ecstasies, what we have hold of or what we are talking about...

...I feel this attraction a century on," she says...

...Still, Gordon acknowledges that women were drawn to James...

...In Temple's case, it is weakened by her death when James was at the very beginning of his career...

...Both have figured heretofore in the many biographies of James, Minnie (also known as Mary) Temple prominently and Woolson less so...

...But in Gordon's version they were actually and secretly engaged in a "collaboration"—her word —without which the fictions would not have come to be...

...Gordon sees James as an emotional teaser who "drew women out as no other man...

...Not only was he a rat with women, in her view, but he was a selfish, cowardly malingerer and a snob who "would have dearly liked an English forebear...

...Like Minnie, Milly is supposed to be the "American Girl" of the moment—free, spontaneous, generous, and supposedly innocent...

...He changed his mind and supported the War as it progressed and slavery seemed to become the primary issue...

...It was the drama of thwarted women that touched him, Gordon insists, and their deaths "released pulsations of lyrical energy...

...In 1894, in Venice, she is thought to have committed suicide—that, too, is uncertain—and James spent several weeks sorting through and disposing of her effects...

...To top it off "his height was no more than five foot eight," despite what contemporaries such as his secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, have said about his appearance of massiveness...

...Gordon's emphasis on the thwarting of women prevents her from recognizing James' ruthlessness in what matters, the tales and novels—especially during the years following Woolson's death...

...Gordon's response is to say, in effect, "Aha...

...Her subject, she further notes, "was adept at avoiding inconvenience...

...Let us study the lacunae, the mystery of why James kept these women "under wraps.' " Many of Gordon's conclusions, in short, result from examining selected fictions for the supposed presence of Temple or Woolson...

...As for Woolson, at least in surviving documents James was not so enraptured by her...

...There is, of course, good enough reason to pursue these matters insofar as the pursuit amplifies the fiction...

...Thus it follows that James was deficient as a man because he did not adequately acknowledge or repay their gifts to him...

...It could be that Milly—and there are plenty of hints about this in the novel—really is not sick at all...

...And Gordon (whose books include a biography of Charlotte Brontë) has gone for the ecstasies in the worst sense of the word—or, rather, in the absence of direct evidence, she has created Crescendos of suppositions...

...a friend of many years with whom I was extremely intimate and to whom I was greatly attached...

...James did not respond to the hint, either out of ignorance or reluctance...

...Upon hearing of her death, he spoke of Woolson in a letter as "a close and valued friend...

...Woolson, Gordon believes, wanted a commitment of some sort...

...Minnie is said to have been the inspiration for any number of James' heroines, including Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, and Daisy Miller in an eponymous novelette...

...a woman so little formed for positive happiness that half one's affection for her was, in its essence, a kind of anxiety...

...When Alice was very sick in Bournemouth, England, in 1885, writes Gordon, James "went there, he told people, to care for his "poor sister.' In fact, he left his sister to the hired nurse he brought down with him, and spent only 20 minutes a day at her bedside...

...Gordon notwithstanding, it is an open questionjust how far his affection for her went...

...That these two women were important to Henry James is sufficiently clear, and it is more than likely that Minnie Temple especially, and Woolson maybe, supplied him with hints of character and starting points...

...The idea of "collaboration" would be extravagant even if there were direct evidence...

...and then swerved from responsibility...

...And in lit-crit these days, not a great deal of that is going on...

...She therefore concludes, "Nothing made James feel so alive as hearing of Minnie's death...

...Gordon's book is about what she construes as shabby treatment of two other women by James: his cousin Minnie Temple and the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson...

...His connection to Woolson is cloudier, and almost all of their correspondence was destroyed...

...Her reading of James' life and letters may be carping and wrongheaded but her response is passionate...

...He "leaned on the generosity of women who surrendered 'the Light of their Lives.'" More, he had little use for living subjects in need of reciprocity...

...Once she transforms occasional inspiration into "collaboration," Gordon is ready for James' betrayal...

...She and James did develop a relationship, though, and for a period of four months in 1886-87 they shared a nine-room villa in Florence...

...In his lecture entitled "The Lesson of Balzac" James himself said: "Literature is an objective, a projected result...

...But to read The Wings of the Dove without conflating Minnie and Milly is to see another Milly Theale...

...James himself would say of Isabel Archer (in a letter to a friend) that while the character was not a portrait of Minnie, he did have her in mind...

...Then, sometime in 1862 —either spring or fall, the date is in dispute—Henry suffered a disabling injury to his back that was to plague him for the rest of his life...

...Close to Henry in their youth, Minnie died at the age of 24 and his recollections of her are eloquent...

...Minnie Temple was an orphan...

...As excuses go, Gordon has little use for the story about Henry Sr.'s choices and none for back pain...

...Some of those epithets are perhaps deserved...

...Woolson's biographer, Joan Myers Weimer, does not...

...Yet at the same time, expressing his shock to John Hay, James observed that Woolson "had always been, to my sense...

...There would be What Maisie Knew and The Spoils of Poynton in 1897, In the Cage and The Turn of the Screw in 1898, The AwkwardAge in 1899, The Sacred Fount in 1901...

...She was "rare and radiant," he wrote, adding: "If I have spoken of the elements and presences round about us that 'counted,' Mary Temple was to count, and in more lives than can now be named, to an extraordinary degree...

...Leon Edel, in his great five-volume biography of James, agrees...

...Gordon also assails the portrait of Henry as especially close to his sister, Alice—one of the constant themes in Jean Strouse's authoritative 1980 biography of her...

...Dying of tuberculosis, she wanted to go to Rome and wrote to James, her one relative in Europe, obliquely proposing that he take care of her...

...That was their father's decision, however...

...All are accounts not merely of innocence corrupted, but, ever so slyly and probably amusedly, of sexual prédation and manipulation on the part of persons you would never suspect...