A Chance Meeting, page 5
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Grant and Brady may not have had much to say to each other on the afternoon the photograph was taken, though they would have appreciated each other’s immediately apparent organizational capacity, which was, in both of them, akin to a visual sense. They marshaled equipment and supplies, they kept assistants and telegrams moving back and forth between the front, their field headquarters, and Washington, and, somehow, they kept the map of the whole country and its battles in mind.
Grant saw the world geographically. He could look at a map and immediately and for the rest of his life know all the features of terrain he had never walked. Instead of entrenching and fighting, his armies moved around their enemies. His engineers built bridges and tunnels and dams to get soldiers over and through barriers. Grant, the first general to start a battle by having his commanders synchronize their watches, realized that failing to move through landscape in a certain amount of time was the surest way to lose the war. Victory was on the side of motion. Grant saw his forces emerging out of the terrain, taking shape across it.
At West Point, the only class Grant had liked and done well at was a drawing class taught by Robert Weir, who, ten years later, also at West Point, taught drawing to the future painter James McNeill Whistler. Sketching was taught at West Point because good generals had to have a visual grasp of terrain. During the Civil War, the military began to see similar uses for photography. Initially, Brady had been allowed to photograph the war simply because he knew the right people in Washington. But as the war dragged on, it became clear that topography, the planning of battles, and the documenting of soldiers, hospitals, and the dead were all aided by the new medium. Photography—including the first aerial photographs, taken from hot-air balloons—became an active tool in fighting the war. And photographers, like the members of that other increasingly important profession, engineers, came to have their place in the service of generals.
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While Grant was at City Point, Lincoln survived two political tests: the Republican convention, at which Grant, though explicit that he was not running, received a few votes, and the general election. In late August, Lincoln, so sure was he of coming political defeat, began making plans for handing the government over to the Democratic candidate, George B. McClellan. Then Sherman took Atlanta on September 2, Sheridan defeated Early at Cedar Creek on October 19, Union soldiers who wanted to be there for the victory started reenlisting, and Grant attacked Petersburg again. The battles were fought for many reasons, but it was, in some sense, the most brutal campaign for the presidency ever waged.
The central issue in the election was whether or not there would be a negotiated peace, allowing the South to continue, self-determined and slave-owning. Slavery had, by that point, become intolerable to Grant and Lincoln. A different president and a negotiated peace would have ruined not only Grant’s war but his chance to be president after Lincoln, something that Grant wanted very much. Because he could not, himself, move decisively from City Point, he needed Sherman and Sheridan to deliver the victories that would get Lincoln back into office so that Grant could win the war his way. Grant and Lincoln wanted unconditional surrender.
And that’s what Brady’s photograph was really in service of. Grant needed to look like a sure thing, and Brady, who had been photographing presidents and generals since 1849, knew how to give a portrait inevitability. Brady had taken more portraits of Lincoln than anyone else had; he had bet his collection on the Union, and he knew exactly what would happen if Lincoln was elected, the war was won, and Grant was up for president in 1868.
The nearsighted entrepreneur and the man who was trying to win the bloodiest war in American history were not especially concerned to make a beautiful photograph. But as soon as the photograph was developed, Grant and Brady would have seen that the wide wings of the tent, the contrast of the white ground with the dark figure, and the graceful posture of the hero would all help to confer the immortality both the general and his photographer were seeking.
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Brady, standing behind the camera, looking at Grant leaning against the tree, felt something was still not right. He sent one of his assistants to stand off to one side and told Grant to look just above the assistant’s head. Grant’s eyes refocused; his whole face became stronger, more resolute. The photographer nodded with satisfaction. The general no longer seemed stiff, not at all posed. There would be no feeling that he was listening for the sound of the cover closing over the lens. People seeing the photograph would sense the authority with which he held the whole war in his hands. They would imagine that he always looked like this, in the midst of carnage, still standing calmly, as if he were merely waiting for someone to come.
4. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND HENRY JAMES
WILLIAM Dean Howells was pacing the rug in his library. He was worried that his Italian sketches were going to seem too parochial, that he ought to include more history, more erudition. But then he didn’t think he had the subtlety or depth of James; he could never retain a thousand impressions from standing in front of a painting. It really was presumptuous to write about Europe; he was always behind on English and French novels and had not yet read the new George Eliot novel that James said was so good. Howells came to a turn in the pattern of the rug. He remembered, as he sometimes did in moments of doubt, the praise James Russell Lowell had lavished on his writing about Venice. He thought that his Italian sketches would probably sell and that he and Elinor needed the money to pay for the bookshelves. He stopped to admire these briefly, reminded himself that James really knew nothing of the business of all this, no matter how clear he was on the principles, and, taking a deep breath, as if this resolved the question at least for the moment, began to run over the brilliant things James had said. Sometimes it took a full hour of pacing to finish in one’s head a conversation begun earlier in the evening with Henry James.
It was 1866; they might have talked about Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons or Flaubert’s Salammbô, both of which James could have read in French in the last few years. More likely, they settled in to parsing Eliot’s latest, Felix Holt, just six months old, about which James had been writing a review for the Atlantic Monthly, of which Howells, now a mature twenty-nine, was the assistant editor. James could easily have spent the whole conversation on the merits and shortcomings of one of its central characters, Esther Lyon.
Though it was winter and they had meant just to take a turn through the Cambridge streets, they had found themselves walking, as they often did, out as far as Fresh Pond. They talked of the American novel, its limitations and possibilities. James was twenty-three and had written a few short stories—one, called “The Story of a Year,” had appeared in the Atlantic. James thought the material America offered its novelists was shallow. In his opinion, if you were writing of the American landscape the only solution was the one Nathaniel Hawthorne had found, to write what Hawthorne called romances—realism just flattened out without the depth of history. James would later write a biography of the creator of Hester Prynne, admiring the way that Hawthorne raised novels, like delicate flowers, out of the thin, unyielding American soil. Howells shared something of this feeling; he had been glad of his years in Venice, though he still felt himself to be an ignorant American. Henry James, who had a sense that he would love Italy, was jealous of Howells’s sojourn, while Howells, for his part, envied the ease of Henry James’s French and the seeming sophistication of his upbringing in New York and Geneva, London and Paris.
Of late, though, Howells had been getting more and more interested in what might be done with the stuff of an American life, a project in which he was helped by the vigorous conversation and discerning taste of his wife. He had met Elinor Mead, the daughter of a prominent Vermont family, when she was visiting her Ohio relatives and he had successfully courted her, largely at a distance. She, adventurously, agreed to his proposal that she come to Italy to marry him. Now they had returned to the States and were starting to build their household in Cambridge, and he was shortly to begin writing the novels that would chronicle their relationship: Their Wedding Journey, A Hazard of New Fortunes, and, in some sense, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Modern Instance, all very American novels of husbands and wives and families set almost entirely in Boston and New York.
Still, Howells shared with James a sense of the obstacles facing the realist project in America. The morning after this walk, Howells, with the sixth sense that always characterized his artistic judgment, wrote to a friend, “Talking of talks, young Henry James and I had a famous one last evening, two or three hours long, in which we settled the true principles of literary art. He is a very earnest fellow, and I think extremely gifted—gifted enough to do better than any one has yet done toward making us a real American novel.”
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By 1866, Henry James and his parents were settled in Cambridge; William, who had returned from a biological specimen–gathering expedition to Brazil, did not remain long and was soon on his way to Europe to avoid having, or acknowledging having had, a nervous breakdown. All their adult lives, William and Henry James found themselves subject to the most disturbing backaches, headaches, stomach ailments, and exhaustion whenever they tried to live on the same side of the Atlantic. These maladies were at their worst if both men were resident in their parents’ house.
Henry James, Sr., had found Cambridge congenial and had become friendly with the Boston literary circle in part through Emerson, with whom he corresponded voluminously on matters of transcendence. Curtis and Wilkie James, both of whom had fought in the Civil War, were in Florida, damaged but alive and struggling to make a go of a cotton farm. Alice James, though she was often ill, and was back and forth to New York for the care of a specialist, was sometimes to be found at the center of a fierce debate in the Jameses’ parlor—Howells knew her as “a clear, strong intelligence, housed in pain.” Howells felt at home with the James family; his own father, like Henry James, Sr., was an abolitionist and a Swedenborgian. Writing later, Howells couldn’t remember whether it was at the Jameses’ house or somewhere else that he had first met young Henry James, whom his friends often called Harry to distinguish him from his father, but “we seemed presently to be always meeting, at his father’s house and at mine” or in “the kind Cambridge streets.” And when they met they talked not of Reconstruction or share-cropping or the futility of work in the face of destruction—they were “always together, and always talking of methods of fiction.”
Both Howells and James had many close male friends, but, particularly in this youthful moment, they did not like the subjects generally favored in conversation with men—politics and business. They preferred the company of women and what were often considered women’s subjects—art and writing and domesticity—and they knew they were writing for an audience made up mostly of women. “American literature,” Howells would write in the 1890s, “exists because American women appreciate it and love it.”
A mutual friend of theirs, Henry Adams, described something of their shared sense of American women in The Education of Henry Adams:
The American woman of the nineteenth century will live only as the man saw her; probably she will be less known than the woman of the eighteenth; none of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can ever be nearly so familiar as her letters have made her; and all this is pure loss to history, for the American woman of the nineteenth century was much better company than the American man; she was probably much better company than her grandmothers.
Henry James and William Dean Howells and Henry Adams considered their sisters—Alice James, Victoria Howells, and Louisa Adams—among their closest and most important friends. James would not have left off this list his favorite young cousin, Minny Temple. These women were wonderful conversationalists, sometimes much more interested in politics than their brothers were. Perhaps, now and again, as William Dean Howells and Henry James ambled along together, they felt the presence of their sisters.
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In 1869, Henry James left the hard newness of America for the soft crumbling buildings of England and Italy. Howells missed him very much. James wrote faithfully—their correspondence went on for forty-seven years—but, especially in the beginning, was so taken with his new surroundings, with the delightful freedom of being in Italy, the absorbing paintings in front of which he spent so many hours, the decadence of gondolas and of Americans with frescoed palazzi, that he was perhaps a little slighting in his attentions to Howells.
Still, in their letters, they often recurred to their walks together and to their shared project of making American novels. In recent years, Howells had convinced James Fields to publish further short stories by James, long after the elder editor had despaired of James’s lack of happy endings. “What we want,” Fields told James, “is short cheerful stories.” When Howells became editor himself he was one of James’s steadiest publishers, serializing, among others, Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, and The Portrait of a Lady in the Atlantic. James wrote to Howells decades later that Howells had been his first real supporter: “You showed me the way and opened me the door.”
For a little while, James continued to think that Howells was depriving himself of good material by staying too much in the United States. In 1871, James wrote to a friend that it was a shame Howells’s “charming style and refined intentions are so poorly and meagerly served by our American atmosphere.” But, two years later, James was delighted to receive the most recent installment of Howells’s A Chance Acquaintance, with its appealing heroine, Kitty Ellison, and began to feel that there was something more than he had suspected to Howells’s sense of American character:
Your work is a success and Kitty a creation. I have envied you greatly, as I read, the delight of feeling her grow so real and complete, so true and charming. I think, in bringing her through with such unerring felicity, your imagination has fait ses preuves. I wish I could talk over her successor with you, sitting on the pine-needles, by Fresh Pond.
A Chance Acquaintance was unusual in concerning itself entirely with a young, vigorous, and bookish American woman’s experience `of the world around her. Howells decided not to marry off his heroine, but to let the story of her trip to Quebec simply take up and leave off. Henry James was inspired by Kitty and the other women who turned up in Howells’s novels. Kitty’s “successor,” the one James wished they could talk over at Fresh Pond, was arguably Daisy Miller, whom James brought over to Switzerland five years later, in 1878.
By this time, James was in the thick of things in Europe—he was seeing a great deal of Turgenev, who had introduced him to Flaubert. Howells wanted to know all about his friend’s enviable proximity to these writers. In 1876, James wrote to Howells:
They are all charming talkers—though as editor of the austere Atlantic it would startle you to hear some of their projected subjects. The other day Edmond de Goncourt (the best of them) said he had been lately working very well—on his novel—he had got upon an episode that greatly interested him, and into which he was going very far. Flaubert: “What is it?” E. de G. “A whore-house de province.”
Howells wrote back to say he was glad he wasn’t French. But, though his tastes were occasionally curbed by a certain prudishness, Howells followed James’s discoveries closely and brought modern European work to the Atlantic and later, in his column “The Editor’s Study,” to Harper’s Monthly. He published reviews of works by Turgenev and by Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Maupassant, and, most especially, Tolstoy that helped to introduce these writers to American readers. Howells admired Turgenev’s work tremendously and was pleased to hear that Turgenev, too, had liked A Chance Acquaintance.
Under the influence of European realism and with the darkening of age, Howells and James watched their American woman grow, by 1880, more stoic and more tragic, into Catherine Sloper in Washington Square and then, in 1881, into the subtle Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. Howells added intensity and jealousy to her original innocence for Marcia Gaylord in A Modern Instance, published in 1882, and then took her up again as the droll Pen Lapham in The Rise of Silas Lapham, serialized in Century along with James’s The Bostonians, for which James created Verena Tarrant. Howells then gave her a luminous independence as Alma Leighton in A Hazard of New Fortunes in 1890. In 1897, James sent back across the Atlantic Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton and shortly after was ready to bring her forward as Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove and, finally, as Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl.
The fates of these later American women could be attributed in part to what happened to the writers’ sisters and cousins, none of whom reached fifty. Alice James suffered a life of illness and died of breast cancer; Minny Temple was killed by consumption; Victoria Howells volunteered to care for Henry Israel Howells, their disabled brother, and was gradually immolated by his constant needs, dying of malaria; and Louisa Adams contracted tetanus after a cab accident. In their portraits of American women, William Dean Howells and Henry James paid homage to their sisters.
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Howells and James were prodigiously productive. Howells wrote so much that sometimes his right thumb swelled up and his right wrist gave out altogether. Each wrote a book a year for almost forty years, and each read all the other’s work. They wrote as they talked, the way ordinary people walk: fluently, unerringly, reliably, with their own gaits, confidently, over their own terrain. And they wrote next to each other, into and out of each other’s lives, as if they still walked, every few weeks, out around the perimeter of Fresh Pond.
