It’s October 1901, and you’re a fifty-two-year-old writer from Maine who has garnered praise for your “local color” novella, novels, and short stories. But something intriguing causes you to deviate from “local color” realism, and you set off into the mists of history and return with a historical novel called The Tory Lover. Houghton-Mifflin publishes it, and you decide to send a copy to a friend you’ve met in Boston’s literary circles—the prolific and celebrated Henry James. By age fifty-eight, James has already written numerous acclaimed works, including the psychological thriller The Turn of the Screw and the enormously popular novel The Portrait of a Lady. Now he’s an esteemed expat, living in Sussex, England, in the small town of Rye. His brick Georgian house has a lovely name—Lamb House. You address the packet with care, and soon your new novel is skimming across the Atlantic via a transatlantic liner.
There’s good weather, and the securely wrapped book arrives in Liverpool in just over a week. Not long afterward, The Tory Lover is centered on a small table, alongside a reading lamp. It’s early October, the nights chilly, and a mound of coal winks red on the grate of the hearth, throwing off steady quiet heat. James, in a long silk dressing gown, sits in his leather reading chair, crosses right leg over left, and opens the novel. The first page is decent, but he’s not thrilled. By the third page, he’s displeased. By the end of the first chapter, he’s exceedingly unhappy and already wondering what in the world he’ll write to the author. Four days later, he finishes the novel’s last page, closes the book, and places it face down on the side table. A wall clock clicks and whirs faintly as its two hands conjoin on the numeral twelve. His valet has been dismissed hours earlier. The three women who make up the rest of his household staff have also retired for the night. Lamb House is profoundly still, but James is too agitated for sleep. The fine machinery of his mind is generating words that are spinning themselves into sentences and those into paragraphs. He gets up from his chair and goes to his desk. Sleep, he fears, might cause it all to blur and dissipate. For the moment it’s right there, a gorgeous inner tapestry needing only his pen, paper, and hand. Ah! The pen is already filled. Good.
Dear Miss Jewett,
Let me not criminally, or at all events gracelessly, delay to thank you for
your charming and generous present of The Tory Lover…
So far so good. He’s being charming and generous himself, and that’s pleasing. He continues on a while in that vein, even referring to the time, past midnight, but soon he’s writing (as we ourselves do at times) that he wishes he could write a longer letter. Those words form the prelude to what he needs, above all, to make clear: that The Tory Lover is an ingenious exercise but he’s not in sympathy with experiments of its general (to my sense) misguided stamp. Then he exclaims There I am! As if to say That’s it in a nutshell! More, though, is coming: a full-throated Jamesian explanation. The“historic”novel is, for me, condemned, even in the case of labour as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness… Yes, he uses the British spelling of “labor.” He has already called his friend Miss Jewett a fellow craftsman & a woman of genius and courage, cushioning the necessary blows of condemned and fatal cheapness and misguided. And these:
You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like—the real thing is almost impossible to do, & in its essence the whole effect is as nought [sic]. I mean the evolution, the representation of the old CONSCIOUSNESS, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the action of individuals, in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world were non-existent…
Why “nought”? Because what you, the writer are doing is trying to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman…whose own thinking was intensely-otherwise conditioned. This means you will have to simplify back [in time] by an amazing tour de force—& even then it’s all humbug. (Yes, he uses “man” and “woman” as objects of the verb “think.” It’s telling—James, a cerebral writer, using “think” and not “imagine.”)
Heavy words. They’ll need some balance. You, I hasten to add, seem to… have seen your work very bravely & handled it firmly: but even you court disaster by composing the whole thing so much by sequences of speeches. It is when the extinct soul talks & the earlier consciousness airs itself, that the pitfalls multiply & the “cheap” way has to serve…
Oh dear, Miss Jewett, he means, you definitely blew it with this novel. You’ve resorted to the cheap way. It’s not the real thing. It’s something that takes the place of the real job. So: humbug.
He then crafts a possibly consoling metaphor after writing how he’s concerned that his words have touched you with cold water. He had meant them to be a kind of new baptism…a re-dedication to altars but briefly…forsaken. He urges her to go back to her dear country of pointed firs; this, an allusion to Maine and Sarah Orne Jewett’s acclaimed novella, The Country of Pointed Firs. Go back to the palpable present…that wants, misses, needs you.
In short, let The Tory Lover be a one-off.
As James finally raises his pen, it’s well after one a.m. Time to conclude!—with as much graciousness as he can muster, which is quite a lot, even at one in the morning. Then he dries the ink with his silver-backed blotter, folds the foolscap and inserts it into an envelope from the stationery drawer of his capacious desk.
Finally, finally, he’s free to turn back the silk counterpane and slide in between stiff white sheets. But the apparatus of his mind is still in high gear, thrusting the just-written sentences back at him. That cold water reference—cold water, indeed. And the baptism analogy, though fine and elegant, implying sin and the need to be cleansed. Goodness. What if another writer said that to him?
It must be half past one, at least, yet the machinery clatters on. Should he ring for hot milk? Had he been too critical? Not supportive enough? After all his care? After that tightrope walk of a letter? For heaven’s sake, now his stomach is roiling, he really should ring for milk. That letter is going to sting, and he’ll have to make amends—somehow. The linen crackles as he turns one way and then another, under the airy duvet. Clinkers fall through the hearth grate. The room is colder. He should have been asleep hours ago. Tomorrow will be ruined! And of all things, a cramp has decided to attack his foot and is creeping upward into his right calf. The muscles spasm—as they sometimes do, for whatever indeterminate reason—probably, now, just to add excruciating torment to the fray.
But, somehow, the next morning happens. There’s the early tea tray. Drapery is pushed back. The day looks to be fine. Although he’s tired, quite tired, he’ll work. Work is always just the thing to pull one through. Drive away the exhaustion, paradoxically. The Golden Bowl. Should that really be its title? Yes! It feels solid. It has that…that rightness one can instinctively sense but seldom explain. Happy thought!
Passing through his study from the bathroom, he notices the envelope on his desk, and then specters from the previous night are pressing forward again. But this time he’s able to counter them with a thought as crystalline as the October light that morning: the words simply had to be conveyed. She’s a much better writer than that and really shouldn’t be wasting her time on, well, the cheap, the inauthentic. He did what was necessary, unpleasant as it had been. And it helped clarify his own thinking. But why in the world had she seen fit to impose that novel upon him? And why does he feel, still, that a great impropriety has been committed? Responding took time—not to mention the time spent reading the thing. His letter took time, craft, finesse and energy—so late at night! And he did not like doing it—but had to! He’s embarrassed for her; it will be awkward to meet again. Further bother.
He picks up the envelope and stares at its address. Was he too hasty? Should he perhaps…rewrite the thing? Temper it somewhat? Add a bit more praise, at least? Or, outright lie? Heavens, no! Not lie. That would be unconscionable. That would be an egregious act. He rings for his valet and when Sanford arrives, hands him the envelope and instructs him to send it out with the day’s post.
The letter gone from his study, he need only do one other thing before breakfast—shelve the novel, though to be perfectly honest, he’d rather discard it altogether. Doing so, though, might truly haunt him and only serve to cause more misery. So he shelves it with the Js, and then, as if in reward, a tidy stack of pages catches his eye—his Golden Bowl. That single glimpse causing his entire being to surge with energy and delight at what’s already been achieved and what still lies ahead. All those possibilities, the glorious work…
~
Obviously, I made most of that up. Reality, whether contemporary or historical, is unfathomable, apart from a few facts—and even those, especially these days, often contested. James’s letter does beg the question: What is the real thing? Yet he’s right in asserting that we don’t have the requisite “apparatus” to depict, exactly, a historical figure’s thought processes. Who could depict anyone’s, exactly? As portrayed in my sketch, James’s thoughts are an imaginative construct, an approximation, And yet, there is a measure of emotional truth in it. I do know from my own experience, for instance, how it feels when I need to tell someone what they probably won’t want to hear. And I do know about having second thoughts. In the sketch, I invented details based on memories of my own feelings whenever I’ve had to critique students’ work—giving with one hand and taking away with the other. It’s far worse with a friend’s work. In that little sketch, I was writing from experienced emotions. Including those when your brain is second-guessing everything. If I reworked the sketch, spent time refining its language and taking out the authorial inserts, it might get closer to, not historical, not scientific, but rather emotional truth. And a reader might feel it, too, as it resonates not just because of recognized emotion but also because of shared emotion, shared human experience.
Similarly, one might imaginatively construct Sarah Orne Jewett’s emotional experience when James’s letter arrives at her residence in Manchester-by-the-Sea. How she accepts it from the postman. How her stomach seems to float upward as she notes the return address and elegant handwriting. How she’s eager to open the letter yet at the same time anxious. Quickly, she takes a slim silver letter opener from a downstairs desk. Her heartrate ramps up as she slides the blade through the flap. And then she’s reading words telling her that The Tory Lover is no good, that writing it was a waste of time, a charming, stupid little exercise, a “nought.” The compliments sprinkled in, here and there, hardly register. All those other words are smashing the paltry praise. Something very like agony is taking over consciousness, a hurt so stunning she might only describe it, later, as despair. She’s finding it hard to breathe. Her skin feels scalded. How in the world is she ever going to be able to face him, converse about the book? She had put so much effort into that novel! So many weeks. So much care and thought and, yes, feeling. Now she resists an urge to rip the letter in two, but words are more or less sacred to her and those from her friend all the more so. She blinks a few times, clearing her eyes, then takes the letter upstairs to her study and places it in a box of other letters. She’ll reread it later, she tells herself. Maybe in a few days. Then she looks out at the last of the yellow-and-pale-rose maple leaves dropping onto deep-green grass. After a few minutes, she gets on with her morning. But she doesn’t do any writing that day. Her body feels sodden and her head dull, as if with the onset of a bad cold. The following morning, she picks up her pen. Why? Because she’s stubborn, and stubbornness can be a form of courage. And a bit of energy is percolating upward from somewhere and words forming…
~
Again, fabrication. The play of imagination. Is there any truth to the above or is it all humbug? Some truth, I think. As a writer, I’ve been there—emotionally. Many times. And I know that for a writer there may be no emotional pain quite as intense as the pain of rejection, especially of a long work—except for that of losing a loved one, whether beloved human or pet.
If any of the above has led you to think Right, that’s how I feel sometimes, it rings true and I feel bad for Sarah Jewett, then I’ve achieved a real thing for you. It wasn’t just a flip exercise. I tried to get it right by drawing from my own store of emotional experiences. The thing is, I believe that emotions have no shelf life. I believe that they are universal across time and distance. Think of Achilles brooding in his tent outside the walls of Troy after Briseis was taken from him by Agamemnon, or his rage after his friend Patroclus was slain by Hector. I also believe that in a work of art emotions can remind us of our common humanity. Show us that we are not alone. Accurate historical details do matter, as does a degree of verisimilitude, just as believable details and actions matter in contemporary fiction as well as in speculative fiction and sci fi. But equally if not more so, the emotional experience conjured by those details and actions.
It’s true. We can’t “think” our way into a historical character—or even one living in 2022, whether in our town or even in our own households, including ourselves. It has to be via the imagination—that neural network bringing together thought, metaphor, images, memory, and emotion. I’d ague that a good writer, whether in 1901 or 2022, can walk into the mists of history and return with a real thing if not the real thing. And I’m willing to bet that what a reader cares most about in historical fiction—in any fiction, actually—are not the piled up “little facts” but rather the emotional experiences engendered by the whole. It’s great to learn something about a certain time period and vicariously live it, but above all we want to be moved. All great writing does exactly that.
Photo: Untitled acrylic painting by Marco Celotti. Private Collection. Used with permission.
