A Private Life of Henry James by Lyndall Gordron Bloomsbury 500pp, £20 in UK
This book promises to reveal "ties more intimate than sex, closer than those of family and friends". She believes that James manipulated posterity's view of him by destroying letters that he exchanged with his cousin Minny Temple, and later with his fellow writer and expatriate, Constance Fenimore Woolson. By approaching James obliquely, via these two relationships, Gordon hopes to broach the privacy of the famously reticent novelist.
Gordon's thesis is contained in a central image: Henry James, in Venice in 1894, attempting to "drown" a great heap of women's dresses in the Venetian lagoon. "But the dresses refused to drown. One by one they rose to the surface, their busts and sleeves swelling like black balloons. Purposefully, the gentleman pushed them under, but silent, reproachful, they rose before his eyes."
It is a neat dramatisation of James's attitude to women. He lived as a celibate because he believed this was the best thing for his work. He refused to consider marriage because its social and financial obligations would interfere with his writing. Gordon, oddly for a feminist, seems to believe that James wronged both Minny Temple and Fenimore by offering them friendship and intellectual companionship, but not marriage.
Lyndall Gordon is a professional literary biographer, with several highly-praised lives to her credit, including T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woollf and Charlotte Bronte. While she is good at reconstructing events from letters, she appears indifferent to James's work, and totally baffled by his character. It is hard to understand why she undertook this project at all.
Minny Temple was an orphaned cousin of James's. She and her sisters relied on family charity. Minny was lively and intelligent, if somewhat untutored - "Jo March without a Marmee to reprimand her", as Gordon puts it. (Louisa May Alcott was a friend and neighbour of the James family). For Henry James, Minny represented "the idealised pure fellowship of his youth". Unfortunately, she succumbed to TB, and died in 1870 at the age of twentyfour, without ever having fulfilled her dream of seeing Europe. Had some kind relative taken her to Rome that winter, she might have survived a little longer. Lyndall Gordon implies that Henry James, who was himself only twenty-six and recently arrived in Europe to pursue his writing career, should have done more to help. Minny is the inspiration for one strain of Jamesian women, including Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, and Milly Theale, but knowing this does not make these characters any more interesting or memorable.
In 1879, at the age of forty, Constance Fenimore Cooper, a great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans (1826), and herself a popular, commercially successful author, left for Europe, carrying aletter of introduction to Henry James. They got on well, and enjoyed each other's company without, apparently, forming any romantic attachment. It seems they spent most of their time either visiting galleries or "talking shop". James was jealous of Fenimore's sales, but did not hesitate to criticise her work, whose worth she readily acknowledged as far below his own.
Fenimore was prone to depression all her life, and her death, in 1894, by jumping from the third floor window of her Venice lodgings, was apparently suicide. Gordon handles this part of the narrative well, catching the dank atmosphere of Venice in mid-winter, and its effect on an already depressed and lonely woman.
James was shocked , as any friend would be, and went to Venice to help Fenimore's sister to dispose of her goods, and to burn all the letters he had written her, a pact they had agreed between themselves. Again, there is the inference that an offer of marriage from James might have saved her life.
The famous incident on the lagoon may never have happened. The sole source for this story is a very old lady, recounting for BBC radio something Henry James told her in his old age. It could have been fact, or it could have been fiction, a possibility that Gordon does not consider. It is unlikely, given his character and habits, that James would bother personally to dump his friend's dresses in the lagoon, but at least the story provides some colour in an overlong piece of academic speculation.
Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic