It was when he read Daniel Deronda that something came into his mind which had not occurred to him before – the dramatic possibilities of a spirited woman being destroyed by a stifling marriage. By coincidence, at this time he happened also to read Phineas Finn by Trollope, mainly as a way of getting to sleep, and was struck too by the marriage of Lady Laura Kennedy and the sheer interest such an alliance had for the reader whose sympathies had been drawn to the brave, bright heroine confronting her destiny with the illusion of freedom.
He set to work. By then he had lived some years in England, he felt that he could see America more clearly, and he wanted more than anything to bring to life an American spirit who was fresh and free, ready for life and certain only of her own great openness to others and to experience. It was not hard to place his young lady in his grandmother’s house in Albany, the strange, cramped, old-fashioned rooms from which Mrs Touchett, bossy and rich, could rescue Isabel Archer and take her to England where so many of his heroines had longed to go. In England, he could easily surround her with his old and carefully wrought trio of suitors, the straight-talking serious one; the gentler, patrician one; and the one who would be her friend and the fascinated student of her destiny, being too unfit or ill or steeped in irony to be her lover.
He worked on the book in Florence and felt, as he woke each morning in his hotel on the river or later in rooms on Bellosguardo, that he had a great mission now to make Minny walk these streets, to allow the soft Tuscan sunlight to shine on her soft face. But more than that, he sought to re-create her moral presence more finely and more dramatically than he had ever done before. He wanted to take this penniless American girl and offer her a solid, old universe in which to breathe. He gave her money, suitors, villas and palaces, new friends and new sensations. He had never felt as powerful and as dutiful; he walked the streets of Florence and the quays and the steep, winding hill to Bellosguardo with a new lightness, and this lightness made its way into the book. It moved elegantly, easily and freely as though Minny herself were protecting him, presiding over him. There were scenes he wrote in which, having imagined everything and set it down, he was, at moments, unsure whether it had genuinely happened or whether his imagined world had finally come to replace the real.
Yet Minny was real for him throughout the years, more real than any of the new people he met and associated with. She belonged to the part of him he guarded most fiercely, his hidden self, which no one in England knew about or understood. It was easier to preserve her under English skies, in a land where no one cared to remember the dead as he remembered his cousin, where the flat present with its attendant order ruled. It was here he let her walk with the power and haunting resonance of an old song echoing through the years, sounding its sad notes to him wherever he went.
HE HAD FORGOTTEN, until he saw Holmes, how much his old friend loved the English; as soon as Holmes alighted from the train at Rye, he filled the air with stories of whom he had seen and how they were, how deaf Leslie Stephen had become since Julia had died, how Margot Tennant was not the same since her marriage, how charming his new friend Lady Castletown was and how grand. Henry did not even consider speaking, and he knew that if he had, he would have been interrupted immediately. Holmes was bright-eyed, almost fervid, and managed, despite the years, to look even more handsome than ever before, more gallant. Perhaps his time with Lady Castletown, Henry thought, had made him so.
‘I’m afraid,’ he said when he finally found a gap in Holmes’s narrative, ‘I’m afraid there are no lords and ladies at all in Rye. It will be very quiet. Indeed, it is very quiet.’
Holmes clapped him on the back and smiled as if he had just now noticed him. His elevation to the bench seemed to have made him less reserved, if anything. Maybe this was the way, Henry mused, eminent men in their fifties were behaving in America now, but then he pictured William Dean Howells and his brother William and understood that it was merely Holmes who was behaving like this. He tried to explain to Holmes that he had been working on not one but two novels and had not had much company over the previous months other than his servants. Holmes was extolling the landscape and too busy to listen and Henry was suddenly glad that he was staying at Point Hill for only one night. He knew from William and from Howells and others that Holmes had become a famous judge whose theories were discussed in the higher circles of law and politics as the theories of Darwin were discussed by scientists and the clergy. Henry remembered that he had asked William what these theories were and William had put it bluntly that Holmes did not believe in anything and had managed to make this view seem both reasonable and popular. His position was, William said, that he had no position. Howells, on the other hand, was not given to bluntness; he explained merely that Holmes had sought rather forcefully to apply the human and practical element rather than the historical or the theoretical or indeed the moral elements to law. Like Darwin, Howells said, Holmes had developed a theory of winners, but it was his pointed and plain rhetoric that won the day as much as anything else.
He had often wondered, Holmes now said as they made their way through Rye, if he should have come to England to live. He did not suppose, he added, that they would take him to their bosom if he planned to stay. Henry nodded in assent, but soon his mind was elsewhere.
They dined on the terrace, and having eaten they sat in repose watching the great plain below in the fading evening light. Holmes groaned and stretched his legs as though settling down for a long and relaxed evening while Henry wished it were an hour later and he could excuse himself. The talk between them was desultory as they carefully avoided the subjects which would divide them, such as William, with whom Holmes seemed to have quarrelled, and Mrs Holmes, who languished in Boston, and Henry’s novels, on which he knew that Holmes had views. The subjects which they could discuss, the gossip about private and public America, the law and politics, soon petered out. Henry found that he had asked too many questions about too many old friends and Holmes had replied too many times that he hardly saw them and knew very little about them. He suspected, he said several times, that Henry knew more about them than he did.
The twilight lingered and the two men grew silent until Henry felt that they would never think of anything to say again. He moved his chair so that he could study Holmes and saw him now in the gloaming as a deeply contented fellow, at home with himself, and he felt a mild distaste for the aura of good-humoured complacency which Holmes gathered around him.
‘It is strange how time goes,’ Holmes said.
‘Yes,’ Henry replied, stretching. ‘I used to think it went more slowly in England, but having lived here for so long I know that to be an illusion. I depend now on Italy as the place where time goes most slowly.’
‘I was thinking of that summer when we were all together,’ Holmes said.
‘Yes,’ Henry said. ‘That glorious, heroic summer.’
Henry now expected Holmes to say that time had flown since then or that it seemed like yesterday and he wondered how he would respond to Holmes’s banalities. He was already preparing a missive to William, telling him that Holmes as a conversationalist had been laid low.
‘I can remember every moment of that month. Better than I can remember yesterday,’ Holmes said.
They both were silent then; Henry did not know how soon he could take his leave without being rude. Holmes cleared his throat as though to speak and then stopped again. He sighed.
‘It is as though time has moved backwards for me,’ Holmes said, turning towards Henry to make sure he was paying attention. ‘Once that summer was over, I could, as I said, remember it perfectly, but during those long days, with all that talk and all that company, it was as though there existed a great curtain around everything. I felt sometimes as if I were under water, seeing things only in vague outline and desperately trying to come up for air. I do not know what the war did to me, save that I survived. But I know now that fear and shock and bravery are merely words and they do not tell us – nothing does – that when you experience them day in day out, you lose part of yourself and you can never get it back. After the war I was diminished and I knew this; part of my soul, my way of living and feeling, was paralysed but I could not tell what part. Nobody recognized what was wrong, not even myself most of the time. All that summer I wanted to change, to cease watching and standing back. I wanted to join and become involved, drink up the life that was offered to us then as those wonderful sisters did. I longed to be alive, just as I long for it now, and the time passing has helped me, helped me to live. When I was twenty-one and twenty-two normal feelings dried up in me and since then I have been trying to make up for that, as well as live, live like others live.’