My more important role, however, is as Isabel Archer. I have wished too fervently to be the hero—or heroine—of my own life to settle for the part of Pansy. I claim the position of the “young woman affronting her destiny,” a bit afraid, as Isabel is, to look into “unlighted corners,” but nonetheless a seeker of freedom and of understanding. Henry James knew that freedom consists of understanding, however painful. When, to borrow the words of the novel, I came to know “something that so much concerned [me] and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play with an imperfect pack of cards,” I doubted, reassessed, and ultimately forgave my deceivers, marveling, though, how others could play so fast and loose with me.
But to have the experience of my discoveries has also stirred new energy. Like Isabel, on the way to the bedside of her dying cousin, Ralph Touchett, in England, I have felt “deep in my soul . . . an “inspiring, almost enlivening” conviction that life will be “[my] business for a long time to come.” I felt this when I first learned about Freddie, and I feel it now. As a woman now over seventy, I don’t have the span before me that a youthful heroine does. Yet my assent to Isabel’s stubborn strain of optimism comes from a part of me untempered by age and undaunted by experience, some fundamental, abidingly innocent core of self that, paradoxically, is all the hardier because it knows the weight of experience. James suggests this possibility when he writes of Isabel:
To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it ever been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn’t all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn’t it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer? It involved then perhaps an admission that one had a certain grossness; but Isabel recognized, as it passed before her, the quick vague shadow of a long future. She should never escape; she should last to the end.
That James envisions a long future for his heroine is intriguing in light of the links critics and biographers have made between Isabel and James’s beloved cousin, Minny Temple, who died so young. “It is the living ones that die, the writing ones that survive,” James wrote famously in a 1870 letter. But in Portrait, Ralph dies, not Isabel—Ralph the hands-in-his-pockets observer, a stand in, surely, for one of the writing ones. And Isabel is left with “the vague shadow of a long future.”
My general sense is that death intrudes discreetly in the fiction of Henry James. Yes, Daisy Miller succumbs to the bad Roman air, Daniel and Ralph Touchett die in The Portrait of a Lady, and Milly Thrale turns her face to the wall in The Wings of the Dove. But none of these deaths, however arbitrary, seems the work of a capricious a/Author—small or capital “A.” And certainly James would never free his characters from their entrapments the way George Eliot kills off inconvenient husbands. Death serves in his stories as a spur to greater awareness. The living are left to reflect on their shortcomings with merciless clarity.
But sometimes death is important for the way it cuts everything short. And here is a thought that turns me back to Thomas Hardy. In Hardy’s last two novels, the deaths of Tess and Jude leave us with a sense of tragic completion—indeed the final section of Tess is called “Fulfillment”—but also of incompletion and wasted promise. Tess and Jude suffer and die young. Affected survivors are left not so much to gain new insight as to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and go on as best they can.
When Freddie Ayer died six weeks after I visited him for the first time as his daughter, I felt that fate had played a brutal trick on me. It’s hard to call his death tragic—it brought no enlightenment for him or for me—but it did seem cruel, an example of the sport of the President of the Immortals. When I try to reconcile myself to it—and perhaps it’s the survivor’s “grossness” that propels me that way—I am thankful I learned who he was before he died. And also that I went to see him. I knew he was ill with emphysema but had no idea he would die so soon. My visit wasn’t easy, probably not for anyone involved. Freddie and I were both very circumspect. No one wanted to make a “fuss.” But he did tell me, one morning, as we breakfasted together, that he was proud of me. I hold that moment as precious, if not sacred. It’s not on the order of Ralph’s dying exclamation to his cousin, “. . . you’ve been loved. Ah but, Isabel, adored!” But it is what it is, and it helps to round out our story. I think it shifts the emphasis from what wasn’t to what was. I marvel at the ways our narratives serve to console us.
ii
TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES and The Portrait of a Lady have helped me to think about my father in ways that are harder to do more directly. The subject numbs me; I falter even in asking myself why. But through indirection I try to find direction out. I feel almost as if I have borrowed these books for that reason, but now it’s time to put them back in their proper section of my library and reading history. If I do this, it’s also
