I read James' Portrait of a Lady in 1963 but never again until last week, so there had been a gap of almost three score years. During the interim, glaciers have melted, continents have subducted and conventional notions about what constitutes a "lady" have shifted quite marvelously.
After such an interval, it's not disgraceful for me to confess that I remembered very little of the novel and that even major plot points came as a shock and surprise. Moreover, I re-read the novel with a bit of prejudice, because I had recently learned that Theodore Roosevelt once met James and dismissed him as "a miserable little snob." If I hadn't been alerted by Roosevelt's back-of-the-hand slap, I would have recognized that Portrait of a Lady generates enough snobbery to power a nineteenth-century locomotive from Rome to Florence even hauling the book's entire cast of frequent travelers. It's a class-ridden novel in which lesser sophisticates are out-snobbed by superior sophisticates. Despite this unfortunate failing, Portrait of a Lady is a rather wonderful piece of writing.
Let me further confess that I brought a second and more deeply-rooted prejudice to my re-reading. In the early 1960s, when I was a graduate student of "English and American Language and Literature" at a New England university, Henry James was at the apex of his critical reputation. He was "the Master." In fact, an appreciation (or devotion) to James became a sort of ticket of admission to the coterie of the literary elite. A touchstone. If you (that is, me) were able to appreciate and adore James's extraordinarily subtle judgements and discriminations and his sustained and intricate analyses of the velleities of social interactions, why then, you were one of the elect. But if you were baffled by his niceties and sometimes could not divine what the heck he was going on and on about, why then you weren't what James calls in Portrait "a person of sensibility." And if you weren't a person of sensibility, why in the living heck were you studying literary history at a university that had been home to establishment sophisticates since 1636?
Not a James devotee, I managed to slip through the system without the disgraceful lacunae in my preparation coming to anyone's attention. And until this past week, I managed to keep my distance from Mr. Henry James.
But I may have made a mistake to have done so. I'd still say that Portrait of a Lady isn't up there in the stratosphere with Bleak House and Middlemarch, but it's still a darn good novel. It's not conventionally exciting; in fact, it's talky and static in the extreme. Nothing much happens. Isabel Archer talks with Henrietta and HJ analyses the conversation. Then someone goes to Gardencourt and has a long conversation with Lord Warburton. Then Lord W meets Countess C in Rome and they talk. Then Madame Merle, who, we are told, was born in Brooklyn and therefore ought to have known better, has a long conversation with Isabel Archer. Then someone meets someone else in a museum or a train station or a restaurant and they have a long conversation -- once again dissected by HJ. Then they ride the rails to Florence and talk. Meanwhile Ralph Touchett is slowly dying and will continue die (and talk) for another five hundred pages. These various conversations are often oblique, with the most important points omitted or merely implied (to be grasped by persons of subtlety and sensibility). It's all so slow that I sometimes felt myself yearning for a good solid knife fight or at least a lengthy car chase. When Isabel finally tells enigmatic villainess Madame Merle that she doesn't want to see her ever again, I longed for her to spit it out with a a good round "fuck off" -- but no such luck.
And yet as mysteries are revealed in the last third of the novel, Portrait becomes undeniably exciting. Much is familiar; it seems as though James recapitulates the marriage of Dorothea Brooke and Eddie Casaubon in the misalliance of Isabel Archer and the "sterile dilettante" Gilbert Osmond. And also borrows the Pansy plot from the story of Honoria Dedlock. But I came to these insights, if they are insights, only in retrospect; while reading the novel, I was surprised and intrigued.
I strongly object to the ending of the novel, which seemed to violate the trajectory of the plot. Surely Isabel has earned her freedom. To me, her continued bondage to propriety it seems cruel to both the character and to hopeful (but deceived) readers. Cruel, in fact, to the point of sadism. No doubt the conclusion tests a reader's sophistication, and no doubt if I read the voluminous commentary that the novel has engendered, the apparent cruelty of the conclusion would be be explained and justified. But I won't read about the commentary. I'm obviously not a "person of sensibility" and I prefer to remain unimproved, unenlightened, and pissed.