Homosexualizing Henry James
LYONS, DONALD
homosexualizing Henry James By Donald Lyons Henry James spent his life when he evoked with stunning sen-avoiding sex and contriv- suality the experience of being ing in his fictions strate- kissed...
...Henry And the fact that Holmes, too, never made the faintest allusion to a mad springtime of taboo passion with Harry, Novick blithely brushes aside by saying that "the encounters with Henry James . . . evidently were not of great importance to Holmes...
...he's hellbent on romance...
...It was like a word spoken in the darkness: He was in love...
...She needed, perhaps, the encounter with James to find an objective correlative and so to manifest a careful, clever, delicate artistry...
...in Novickese, this becomes: "Alone in his room, Harry wandered in Balzac's landscape...
...the new People-style bio insists that the pen must be lubricated by sex...
...You don't at all delight me," she says to her insistently phallic suitor, Caspar...
...With rigorous industry, he began to produce what is still arguably the richest oeuvre achieved by any American writer...
...during this trip—in an audacious image not in the book—Campion has beans in a frying pan repeat Osmond's words, "I'm absolutely in love with you...
...Gilbert Osmond, a cold aesthete, "might have been" Paul Zhu-kovsky...
...Grainy black and white is reused, after the trip East, for a final journey to England...
...Isabel takes a trip to the East to contemplate Osmond's eerie possessiveness...
...A passage from a 1905 journal entry by James that speaks opaquely of his "initiation premiere" in 1865...
...Cruisy James, it seems, had an active and constant sex life but, because of the cruel "Victorian strictures" of the day, couldn't write about it directly and so pretended he was a series of girls...
...The evidence for this unlikely dalliance...
...The story has, inevitably, a sexual/psychological subtext, but it is not clear how explicitly James wished readers to bound his tale in such terms...
...Thus, in a circular and sly manner, Novick first abuses a phrase from a novel to analyze James's family and later uses his own analysis to interpret the novel...
...Alone in her bed, Isabel caresses her own face, runs her forehead against the canopy's fringe, and finds, in a hot dream, her three possible loves on the bed with her, kissing or watching...
...everything was vague in the unassisted darkness...
...But the bulldozing crudeness and clumsiness of Novick's enterprise are staggering nevertheless...
...The Portrait of a Lady is the story of a young American woman in Europe—James's great theme...
...Martin Donovan's wise frailty as Ralph...
...Novick also frankly announces his intention to strip-mine the novels for sexual/ emotional autobiography: "When James described some experience with apparent firsthand knowledge, Donald Lyons is theater critic of the Wall StreetJournaL memories...
...Most fascinating of the men and women of Balzac's Paris was the squat, powerful, perversely attractive Vautrin: lover of boys, seducer, . . ." Dissolve to three years later, to 1865: "In that epochal spring, in a rooming house in Cambridge and in his own shuttered bedroom in Ashburton Place, Harry performed his first acts of love...
...None other than Oliver Wendell Holmes, then a young Civil War vet and womanizing pal of Henry's brother William...
...But the age of Daisy Miller rials—as he always insisted [did has yielded to that of Diana he?]—most likely were his own Spencer, and the Jame-sian repressed has returned with a vengeance...
...Novick, the author of a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, is clear enough in his preface about what he is up to: He is going to imagine James's emotional life...
...He had a very clear and conscious idea, however, about the relationship between freedom and death...
...And these sexual encounters were with "young men...
...Some time after meeting Zhukovsky, James took a brief, solitary vacation at a Normandy beach...
...Viggo Mortensen's un-apologetic strength as Caspar...
...According to Novick, James "took Longfellow's house, and clapped Lowell into it...
...Sex was just what the doctor ordered to juice up Harry's writing: "The element that had been missing from his work was the strong force that binds people together, that confers on the imagination the power to give meaning to experience...
...She makes a disastrously wrong, imprisoning choice and then tries to regain a measure of autonomy within the prison of her choice...
...Costumed as Madame Merle, James performed his greatest impersonation...
...Campion's is not the only possible approach to The Portrait of a Lady, but it is an invigorating plunge into a subtext left unswum by James...
...The novel is a consideration of such Emersonian topics as the infinite possibility of personality, the ecstasy and danger of life seen as omnivorous openness to experience...
...Novick chases his simplistic theory of literary creation—Character A=Real-life Person B—through all the early novels...
...And with this travesty (quite literally) of the creative imagination of a great writer, we may take leave of Sheldon Novick...
...One of his subtlest critics, Richard Poirier, wrote that "The Portrait of a Lady would be a greater accomplishment if some of its psychological implications were made a firmer part of the whole design...
...it became a parable of a daughter's unhappy disappointment and her father's selfishness that might have been Alice's tale as well as Catherine Sloper's...
...Washington Square is the story of a cruel father, a mousy daughter, and a handsome fortunehunter...
...Here too, Mr...
...He recently told the New York Times, "Henry James writes primarily about, and for, women and gay men, which means he wrote about the majority...
...The objections themselves become, with Alice-in-Wonderland logic, proof: "Perhaps even for this reason...
...It should come as no surprise that James's greatest early novel, The Portrait of a Lady, gets similar treatment...
...This, as readers % of Washington Square will <8 recognize, is a vulgariza-° tion of James's words about his Catherine: "The great facts of her career were that Morris Townsend [the suitor] had trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its spring...
...Henry spent the Civil War years in Cambridge, Mass., at first as a student at Harvard Law School and then as a budding writer for journals in Boston and New York...
...The Saturday Night Live parody called The Washing Machine nailed much that was silly in The Piano...
...Here is Novick's embroidery: "James took long walks on the seashore and along the downs....He felt himself happier than he had been in a long time...
...And Harry wrote a lot...
...Of course, this acrobatic absurdity is the reverse of what actually happened...
...At 18, James was reading Balzac...
...Leon Edel's five-volume life, which appeared from 1953 to 1972, was an attempt—noble, solemn, stiff, pon-derous—to understand James according to the lights of a dogmatic Freudianism...
...Once green with promise, the country house is now white with snow...
...To confect this purple passage, Novick cannibalizes a description of a character in James's novel Confidence...
...James had a very tenuous and unorganized sense of the connection between sexual psychology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the desire for freedom and death...
...Novick scents blood and is soon in full cry...
...Novick gets his facts ass-backwards...
...He spent the rest of his twenties and his thirties learning to know and love three of Europe's sweetest cities: Rome, Paris, and London...
...So much for the old notion of sublimation...
...He was born in New York in 1843 to an eccentric and nomadic rich family that roamed about Europe before it settled in Newport...
...Then there's a Novick tactic to which Millicent Bell has called attention: He weaves into his supposedly nonfiction prose phrases from James's fiction...
...An immense conviction came over him, abruptly...
...He got to know everyone there, everyone in the creative line anyway, and not just Americans...
...Isabel grows tougher and smarter—more like Merle—in the marriage-jail, as the chiaroscuro images make clear...
...The feeling of happiness came upon him somewhat to his surprise, and for a while he savored it and examined it without quite understanding why he should be so happy...
...A recent biography of James, Henry James: The Young Master by Sheldon M. Novick, presents itself as a chronicle of the writer's erotic life, and a new film of his great 1881 novel, The Portrait of a Lady, by filmmaker Jane Campion thrusts into visibility the story's sexual subtext...
...The 1990s being what they are, it was inevitable that we should see a biography fixated on James the gay...
...Every place and person in the book is declared to have been bodily lifted from life: James's friend Mary Temple was "transmuted into" heroine Isabel Archer...
...Novick tells this story—and much more of his own flamboyant invention—in the excited key of a Harlequin romance or an old twi-light-love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name paperback...
...Isabel Archer hesitates among romantic possibilities: the noble Lord Warburton, the fraternal Ralph Touchett, the importunate Caspar Goodwood, the exquisite Gilbert Osmond...
...If Edel spoke from the Eisenhower-Stevenson age, this vision of novel-writing as canny, Dick Morris-like coalition building marks out Novick as the Clinton of James biographers...
...And James, although in a sense every character, was especially villainess Madame Merle: "Deeply attractive...
...One evening, he stood on the beach looking at the sea outside the casino...
...The performances are fine where it matters: Nicole Kidman's vulnerable straightforwardness as Isabel...
...she was Juno, a goddess—old, old indeed...
...cut to Isabel in an arbor refusing Warburton—"because he is too perfect," as she tells the ailing Ralph, her tenderly platonic lover...
...Thus, some twenty pages before discussing Washington Square, Novick says that Alice's illness was "somehow" directed at her father and that "something in the mainspring of her affections had been injured...
...In a usual plot, these two, sparring and angry and sexually charged, would be the destined pair...
...Biography reflects the biographer's culture as much as that of its subject, and there is a feeling abroad that the time may be right for a new consideration of James's life...
...It is just possible that they are so here...
...James's sexual orientation, as we now say, has been an open secret for a hundred years...
...The Osmond problem that has always bedeviled Portrait—How could she marry such a creep?—is not solved but rather exacerbated by the casting of the audacious but creepy John Malkovich in the role...
...As Mil-licent Bell has shown in the Times Literary Supplement, James in 1905 was talking of his long-ago literary initiation, of getting his first articles published...
...Fair warning...
...James's early life was wonderfully interesting...
...But never fear...
...I have taken it for granted that Henry James underwent the ordinary experiences of life: that he separated himself from his enveloping family, that he fell in love with wrong people, that his first sexual encounters were intense but not entirely happy...
...Madame Merle, the evil arranger of Isabel's fate, is seen here (in the unsentimental but sympathetic portrayal by Barbara Hershey) as an earlier Isabel, a tragic first sketch of an American girl in Europe...
...for Novick, it is somehow about Henry James, Sr., and Alice James, the gifted but ailing daughter...
...Death and sex, stasis and motion are held in final equipoise...
...homosexualizing Henry James By Donald Lyons Henry James spent his life when he evoked with stunning sen-avoiding sex and contriv- suality the experience of being ing in his fictions strate- kissed by a man or the memory of a gies of reluctance and shyness in its successful seduction, his raw mate-regard...
...His odd father scribbled articles and gave public lectures about a home-brewed religion that combined the crackpot utopi-anisms of Fourier and Swedenborg...
...She opens with contemporary Australian girls talking about romance...
...He observed the pure strong force of which marital love and the most dissolute and abandoned sexual passion were only different aspects...
...Don't bother Novick with evidence...
...In Paris in 1877, James began an intense friendship with a curious Russian artist, Paul Zhukovsky (who later became part of Richard Wagner's entourage near Naples...
...Back in the arbor where she began, she squirms away from Caspar's enveloping maleness, runs in slow motion toward a French window that she does not open but is frozen against in indecision in literal and metaphorical "freeze frame...
...Jane Campion's brilliant film brings into the foreground the Jamesian subtext of Isabel's hesitancy before/pull toward/fear of sex...
...I've not been a fan of Campion's and thought her last film, The Piano, a clumsy piece of sexual psychologizing vitiated by overwrought symbolism and heavy-breathing humorlessness...
...The Europeans is a little comedy about a pair of European sophisticates visiting a Puritanical Concord (not Cambridge, as Novick thinks...
...Sculpture— tombs of happy medieval couples succeeded by giant fragments in a scrap yard—traces her downfall, too...
...And he read everything...
...His way with truth comes out in another reference to "that spring of 1865" when "an actor, John Wilkes Booth, during the performance of a play in a Washington theater, leaped from the stage into the boxes and fired a revolver at the president, killing him...
...But it is the subterranean demon of the id, Osmond, who—in an underground Italian grotto, as pale light falls from an open cupola on high and a parasol nervously twirls—does master her with a serpent's kiss...
...If too eager to read this or that in the fiction as a function of James's unconscious (visible to Edel), the work was a great accomplishment and deserves more than Novick's sneers about homophobia and "giggling" (if anything, it was Edel's book that made clear the depth of James's later attachments to younger men...
...and turned Howells into a plump, handsome blond parson...
...There are problems with this reading: The imagined heroine, Catherine Sloper, was the "opposite" of Alice, while the fictional father was "the reverse" of Henry James, Sr...
...It is the triumph of the sensual over the affectionate, a sadistic, bold wiping out of scrupulous hesitation...
...Crawling into Ralph's bed of death and cuddling the dying man, Isabel finds a "happiness" and a "love...
...And his sex partner...
...But the icky language—as if Death in Venice were being adapted for Melrose Place—is prime Novick...
...The sea looked huge and black and simple...
...She has here crafted a visual language adequate to a darkly sexual reading of the book...
...James himself peeped out from the grey eyes of his heroine, Gertrude, with disconcerting intelligence...
...James, in the fashion of the time, employed warm language in writing to his family about his new friend...
Vol. 2 • January 1997 • No. 17
