I am a member of a cult. Jamesians we call ourselves, less frequently Jacobites, and we are dedicated to the propagation and sanctification of the works of Henry James (1843–1916), a writer who is, to put it gently, not everybody’s notion of a rollicking good time. Many are the criticisms against James, none of them entirely invalid. Some claim that in his fiction he chewed much more than he bit off; others argue that a great deal of what is at the heart of meritorious fiction—the struggle for survival, the drama of ambition, physical love—is absent from his. Those of us in the cult allow all this, though we view it as quite beside the point. Our condition is put best by James himself in “The Next Time,” a story about an author named Ray Limbert who struggled to produce bestsellers but, unable to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear, could only create masterpieces. In that story, James wrote:

We are a numerous band, partakers of the same repose, who sit together in the shade of the tree, by the plash of the fountain, with the glare of the desert all around us and no great vice that I know of but the habit perhaps of estimating people a little too much by what they think of a certain style.

That certain style, the Jamesian style, is at the crux of the cult. Either one gets it or one doesn’t, and many people, even highly cultivated and well-read people, do not. It is a style in which each heavily nuanced sentence can sometimes seem a veritable barcarole. At other times the Jamesian sentence resembles a hawk, circling, circling, circling before plunging downward to strike off a penetrating observation or startling aperçu. As subordinate clause piles upon subordinate clause—especially in his late style when James took to dictating his prose to a typist—one occasionally forgets that the sentence under investigation has a subject and predicate. And yet, James’s style, for all its rococo circumlocution, did exactly what he wanted it to do, which was to capture consciousness in all its complexity.

Within this elaborate syntax, there is Jamesian irony to consider. Irony is the art of obliquity, of saying one thing yet meaning another, richer, often comical thing. Entire stories of James’s were written in ironic mode. Only James could have described a minor character, in his novel The Europeans, as “inconvenienced with intelligence.” The narrator of “The Next Time,” a critic, remarks of his contribution to a magazine that “I supply the most delicious irony,” to which his publisher replies, “that’s not in the least a public want. No one can make out what you’re talking about and no one would care if he could.” But when it comes to Henry James, we cultists do care, care awfully. A nineteenth-century critic in The Nation remarked of James’s style that “the reader feels irresistibly flattered at the homage paid to his perceptive powers.” This homage is part of what attracted us to the cult in the first place.

Michael Gorra, a professor of English at Smith College, a fellow Jamesian cultist, has found a new and interesting approach to writing about Henry James. In the preface to his Portrait of a Novel, Gorra declares that he has written “the tale not of a life but of a work.” The work is The Portrait of a Lady, and Gorra’s book shows how

Henry James created Isabel Archer’s portrait, and to what end: tells not only what happens in the book itself but also the story of how James came to write it and what happened to him while he was doing so; of the book’s relation to the major fiction of the decades around it, and of how it was published and received and then, many years later, revised.

The Portrait of a Lady is an excellent choice for this exercise. The novel was published in 1881, then reworked in 1906 by James for the New York Edition of his collected fiction. The Portrait of a Lady is from James’s so-called middle period; after it he wrote The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886). The novel was commercially successful, selling some five thousand copies; the two novels following it were harshly reviewed and sold poorly, plunging James into the doldrums. More important, as Gorra skillfully demonstrates, in The Portrait of a Lady Henry James greatly advanced his art, becoming the great novelist of consciousness that he remains in our time. By novelist of consciousness, Gorra means not only that “he learned to stage consciousness itself” but he was able to compose his novels so that “psychological reasons may stand as subjects in themselves, that the life within has a drama of its own . . .”

The Portrait of a Lady is the story of Isabel Archer, a young American woman taken up and swept off, first to England and thence to Italy, by a wealthy aunt, herself long expatriated and currently living in Florence. Europe introduces Isabel to a wider canvas of prospects and possibilities than America allowed. In America she had been proposed to by a well-to-do businessman named Caspar Goodwood. In England, another marriage proposal presents itself in the person of a Lord Warburton, a man of great wealth and political promise. Isabel turns down both, not wishing to run the standard track of life for women of having no greater meaning than making a conventionally good marriage.

An inheritance received at the death of Isabel’s uncle is engineered by her cousin Ralph Touchett, who feels the money will set her loose to discover her grand potential. The money widens Isabel’s possibilities even further and she is now free to live in any way she wishes. She wishes wrongly, and falls into a marriage with the heartless dilettante Gilbert Osmond, a man who lives for good taste and little else. The marriage had been connived with the aid of another woman, Madame Selina Merle, with whom Osmond has secretly had a child, now in her late adolescence. The novel is about Isabel’s discovery of her grave error in marrying Osmond, and her reckoning of its consequences.

Henry James was thirty-eight when The Portrait of a Lady was published. His informal apprenticeship, during his years living in France, to Flaubert, Zola, and company—and especially to Turgenev—was over. He would soon make the decision to live permanently in England, hoping that it would be impossible for his readers to discern “whether I am, at a given moment, an American writing about England, or an Englishman writing about America.” (T. S. Eliot called Henry James a European but of no known country.) During these years he had closed the books on the possibility of marriage. His failure as a playwright lay ahead as did the commercial disappointment of the New York Edition of his collected and revised fiction. But also ahead lay the advance in subtlety of the last great novels, his so-called Major Phase, including The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904).

Although an academic, Michael Gorra does not write like one. My guess is that his time spent in the literary company of Henry James has made him a more polished writer than he might otherwise have been. James has the salubrious effect of elevating many critics. Leon Edel, the towering figure among James scholars, wrote splendidly when he wrote about James. When, late in his life, Edel turned to a little book on Bloomsbury, the snobbery and the other worst aspects of his subject seemed to rub off on him. In the same way, the subtlety and sophistication of James seem to have rubbed off on Gorra.

To get further inside his subject, Gorra has travelled to the sites that supply the settings of The Portrait of A Lady, as well as to those in which James composed his novel. He remarks that, while living in Venice, James took his morning coffee at Florian’s, which he thought one of life’s “simpler pleasures,” to which Gorra adds, “a phrase that will stun anyone who has ever picked up one of its checks.” As someone who has, I recall thinking when my own check arrived that if I were to dine at Florian’s again I should need to apply for a loan from the Small Business Administration beforehand. Visiting the Villa Castellani, where in the novel Gilbert Osmond lives with his daughter, Pansy, Gorra writes:

Today the building is still painted an ochre-yellow. Its façade is modest, almost anonymous, and it sits directly on the street. . . . And on this spring morning the house was unprotected in another way: its high, brass-studded doors stood open in the sunlight, and the caretaker waved me in for a look. There was a well in one corner of its lichen-covered courtyard and a Vespa in another, while the pavement was set with the gravestones of pets—‘Bubeli, 1913.’ I noted the names on the mailboxes of the dozen flats into which the building was divided: a German, a Scandinavian, and then a lot of Italians, including somebody called Corleone.

In 1889, remarking on the way Henry James, Sr., brought up his family, with such frequent European travel and residency as nearly to constitute expatriation, William James said his younger brother Henry was “a native of the James family, and has no other country.” Gorra is excellent in chronicling this extraordinary family. Much of this ground has of course been covered earlier by F. O. Matthiessen, Leon Edel, and others, but Gorra handles it with admirable concision, integrating it smoothly into his main story, which is the creation of The Portrait of a Lady.

Isabel Archer supplied James with another foray into his international theme, the confrontation of Americans with the older civilization of Europe. Gorra reads the novel sensibly and, in an old-fashioned sense, passionately. He notes of the scene toward the close of the novel at the deathbed of Ralph Touchett that, “I cannot read this scene without tears.” Anyone who reads Michael Gorra will come away with an enhanced sense of the power of The Portrait of a Lady, and wish to return to the novel straightaway.

Gorra reads the novel as a study in the loss of American innocence, even though Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle, the two characters who deprive Isabel Archer of her innocence, are themselves Americans, though of nearly lifelong European residence. James’s “account of the limits of American self-sufficiency,” Gorra holds, “is what, above all, makes The Portrait of a Lady stand as a great American novel.” Gorra deepens his reading when he demonstrates that The Portrait of a Lady is above all “the drama of a perceiving mind.” James learned from Turgenev that great fiction begins, not in event or incident, but in character; and he extended this by broadening the meaning of character by showing how it can be affected by interior thought as much as by circumstances.

T he chief lever of action in The Portrait of a Lady is consciousness. The novel’s settings are England, Florence, and Rome. But its true stage is the mind of Isabel Archer. The subject of this novel is the growth of consciousness in Isabel as she comes to recognize how she has been used, made a convenience of, betrayed by those she trusted and thought she loved. Owing to a profound mistake in judgment, she realizes that she was trapped in a marriage to a man who despises her and whom she can no longer respect. “Between these four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her the rest of her life,” Isabel thinks. “It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation.” As for Osmond, she now grasps that “Under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers.” Isabel’s error is fatal. “Nothing was a pleasure to her now; how could anything be a pleasure to a woman who knew that she had thrown away her life?”

Michael Gorra observes that in his fiction Henry James’s primary interest is in victims. Catherine Sloper in Washington Square, Hyacinth Robinson in Princess Casamassima, Maisie Farange in What Maisie Knew, Maggie Verver in Wings of the Dove—these characters have been used by others, or had others wish to mold them to their own ends, or were betrayed by them in pursuit of their own desires. Victims are the people for whom James’s greatest sympathies are engaged.

James sympathizes with, but does not pity them. Resignation, renunciation, in the fiction of Henry James, often enriches his characters, lending them a hard-won strength of character and sometimes even an inner radiance. Gorra notes that “James was impatient with the Anglo-American expectation that a book’s last chapters should provide a grab-bag of ‘husbands, wives, babies, millions;’ impatient with both the reader’s demand for such treats and the writer’s willingness to feed it.”

Not a happy-ending man, Henry James sometimes comes closer to being a no-ending man. The Portrait of a Lady is perhaps too vivid an example. All that we are told at the novel’s conclusion is that, after returning to England to be with her cousin Ralph Touchett before he dies, Isabel has returned to Rome. But to do what? To protect her step-child Pansy from the arid chill of her father? To live out her days in a dead marriage, thus paying the full cost of her horrendous error in marrying the wrong man? We are not given the least hint. We are left to fill in what the remaining years of Isabel Archer’s life will be like. If they are to be spent in the company of Gilbert Osmond—and divorce in those days in the Catholic country of Italy was well-nigh impossible—it is difficult to imagine them as anything but bleak. So bleak that, in the BBC television version of The Portrait of a Lady, the scriptwriter ended the story on Ralph Touchett’s deathbed, with Ralph and Isabel declaring their affection for each other. Gorra calls the never quite begun love between Ralph and Isabel “one of fiction’s great might-have-beens.”

In the novel’s final pages, Isabel is visited by her American suitor Caspar Goodwood, who, in the most openly sexual act in all of James, re-proposes to her and kisses her vehemently. In the revised edition of the novel, we read:

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession.

But Isabel sends Goodwood away. James writes: “She looked about her; she listened a little; then she put her hand on the latch. She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.”

Michael Gorra, who finds James’s ending satisfactory, indeed all but inevitable, believes he knows where this path leads. He writes: “She chooses, knowing what she doesn’t want, and she goes [to Rome] because at this point nothing forces her to; her choice is an active one, and she goes because she can. She goes, finally, because to stay would require her to accept an illusion. She would have to believe, with her own earlier self, that an unfallen world does indeed lie all before us.” Perhaps. Yet one would have liked a more filled-out finish to the novel.

James’s revisions for his New York Edition are themselves a subject of controversy among the cult of Jamesians. Max Beerbohm compared the revisions to placing patches of brown velour over gray silk. The Library of America edition of the novel is of the unrevised version. Gorra, who approves the revisions, contends that, in his 1906 revisions of The Portrait of a Lady, James was in better possession of his material, for between 1906 and the book’s original publication in 1881, he had acquired more experience of life and was in a position to understand his heroine in greater depth.

What Gorra takes this experience to be constitutes my one serious disagreement with his excellent book. This is over the question of whether or not Henry James was homosexual. Gorra joins the majority of academic Jamesians in his certainty that James was at a minimum a strongly repressed homosexual: “while we cannot know if James ever acted upon a physical desire, nobody today doubts the shape of his erotic longings,” he writes.

As it happens, there is one person who doubts it—and it turns out to be me. I have been following what I call the Henry James Homosexual Project (HJHP) for some while, and find the evidence set out for James’s putative homosexuality less than thin. The project got a great boost from Colm Tóibín’s novel The Master (2004), which Gorra calls “superb,” but might be more accurately described as “suspiciously suppositious.” Tóibín, who is himself homosexual, imbues James with an unrelenting eye for soldiers and servants, rough trade and smooth, and at one point has him in bed with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a connection first made in a reckless biography of Henry James written by a lawyer named Sheldon Novick. Like Claude Raines in Casablanca, Gorra rounds up the usual suspects—Jocelyn Persse, Paul Zhukovsky, Hugh Walpole, all gay men with whom James kept limited company—in trying to nail down the case for the homosexuality of Henry James. He even describes James’s typist Theodora Bosanquet, who wrote a charming book about her employer, as “a boyishly handsome young woman.”

Like other participants in the HJHP, Gorra thinks the clinching evidence for James’s barely repressed homosexuality is to be found in his relationship with a handsome young American sculptor of monstrously large nude figures named Hendrik Andersen. Gorra speaks of James’s “knee-trembling love” for Andersen. James’s letters to Andersen are marked by an exaggerated affection and physical metaphors of salutation, but then anyone who has read a vast quantity of James’s correspondence knows of his taste for what he himself called “mere gracious twaddle.” I have read the letters to Andersen, and gracious twaddle is what they chiefly are, apart from those portions in which James seriously criticizes Andersen’s art. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, the editor of the 2004 collection of James’s letters to Andersen, doesn’t “think these letters should be read as homosexual correspondence.” She thinks instead that James viewed Andersen as a son. On this point, Andersen, while visiting James at his house at Rye, in east Sussex, described the novelist’s goodness to him as “that kind of goodness that a father gives his son.”

What is behind the need to turn Henry James into a severely repressed homosexual? What purpose does it serve? For some gay writers, perhaps they like the notion of having James, in the Seinfeldian phrase, “on their team.” For the Freudian-minded, no one is allowed not to have sexuality at the center of his character and the motor force for his behavior—and the less evidence for this that is available, the more powerful, it is assumed, the hidden sexual element must be. For Michael Gorra, Henry James’s reputed homosexuality reinforces the argument of his own book that James’s “own renunciations [of his true sexual nature] and solitude allowed him to understand the renunciations of others.”

All this overlooks the primary fact that Henry James was perhaps as complete an artist as the world has known. Chekhov claimed that “medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.” For James, literature was wife and mistress both. Marriage was not for him. Nor were dalliances, homo- or heterosexual. The notion of Henry James with wife and children is quite as preposterous as that of his taking on homosexual lovers. The hardest thing about being an artist, James told Desmond MacCarthy, was the loneliness. Yet this same loneliness made possible the freedom he required to practice his art, which was no less than total. James would have considered it an insult to his imagination to be told that he could only understand the power and dignity of renunciation because he had himself practiced it lifelong through hiding his own true sexual nature. Michael Gorra owes Henry James an apology.