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  He knew of course about the mechanics of procreative intercourse, and from illustrated works of erotica – Lord Houghton’s collection at his country house had been particularly informative – he was acquainted with the variations and perversions which human ingenuity and depravity had added. But he found it impossible to imagine himself performing any of these acts, even the most elementary, with anyone; and he had never, even as a young man, positively desired to do so – not with Minny Temple, the New England cousin with whom, before her tragically early death, he had sometimes thought he was in love, nor, at the other end of the female spectrum, with the prostitutes who constantly importuned him in Piccadilly during his first years in London. One consolation of his increasing years – perhaps the only one – was that his innate lack of concupiscence would seem increasingly less remarkable to others.

  In the end it was probably the insistent pressure of sexual activity and sexual obsession in French literary life that had driven him from Paris and determined him to make his home in England. Flaubert, Maupassant, Daudet, and the rest – they all had love affairs and mistresses and frequented brothels, ruining their health in the process, and they were constantly pushing at the boundaries of decency in their writings. When it dawned on them that Henry had no carnal interest in women they sometimes assumed his taste must be for men or young boys, which Henry found still more offensive. The idea that one might be celibate and yet an authentic artist was clearly unthinkable to them. The hypocrisy of English society, where the true extent of adultery and vice was suppressed and denied in life and in literature, only surfacing in the occasional sensational court case, was in many ways odious and repugnant, but it provided useful cover for a bachelor novelist who was fascinated by the power of sexual attraction in human relations but unqualified and disinclined to represent the intimate details of such experience. He aimed in his fiction to steer, by means of subtle suggestion and eloquent ellipsis, a middle course between the shocking but adult explicitness of the French novel and the childish evasions and falsehoods of the Anglo-American variety. It was however necessary to this project that the novelist should know exactly what it was he was leaving out. Therefore, although he went along, in polite society, with the conventional English disapproval of ‘vile’ and ‘beastly’ French novels, he read a good many of them.

  Between Trixy’s engagement and marriage he read Maupassant’s Une Vie, which had just been published in France to an uproar of controversy about its explicitness, especially its account of the innocent heroine’s honeymoon – the brutal shock of her first experience of intercourse, her distressed endurance in succeeding days of her husband’s goatish demands, and then her own first astonished sensation of sexual pleasure. One hot day, on a deserted, tree-covered hillside in Corsica, as the couple were drinking from a refreshing spring, the husband, Julien, began to fondle his bride, Jeanne, who in a moment of unwonted ‘inspiration d’amour’ filled her mouth with the cool water and offered by gesture to transfer it to his mouth, ‘lèvre à lèvre’. The completion of this act aroused Julien’s desire to a pitch that for the first time evoked an answering response in Jeanne. She pressed herself against him and pulled him down with her on to the ground, her breast heaving, her eyes moist, murmuring ‘Julien, je t’aime!’ and submitted eagerly to be possessed there and then. ‘Elle poussa un cri, frappée, comme de la foudre, par la sensation qu’elle appelait.’ Henry had heard that cry on occasion, through the thin walls of cheap hotel rooms, from behind bedroom doors as he carried his candle along the dark corridors of great country houses, from the shadows under the archways of bridges in Paris at night, without any clear mental images of what it signified. Now he knew. Maupassant could certainly write, however impure the subject matter. Henry read these pages with extreme attentiveness, but without physical arousal: the idea of transferring liquid from one mouth to another, even between lovers, struck him as disgusting.

  He did not lend or recommend Une Vie to Du Maurier, feeling that it would be tactless to do so at this particular time, especially as the heroine’s enjoyment of marital love was shortlived (the odious Julien was soon unfaithful to her). It was obvious that his friend was deeply affected by the imminent flight of his eldest daughter from the domestic nest, and had to make an effort not to fall into gloomy silence when other members of the family were excitedly discussing arrangements for the great day. When the great day actually came Du Maurier of course rose to it heroically – smiled at everyone, made a witty speech, and chided Emma for crying when the bride and groom made their departure. But when Henry called on him the following Sunday at New Grove House, he was like a man bereaved. They went off together for a walk on the Heath and ended up, as they invariably did, sitting on the bench they had occupied on the very first such occasion, when Du Maurier told him the story of his life. It was not situated on some conspicuous height, with a distracting view, but tucked into a byway fringed with Scotch pines, facing south and sheltered from the wind, a situation that invited the sharing of confidences. Henry had indeed dubbed it ‘the Bench of Confidences’.

  When he congratulated his friend on the splendid way the wedding had gone off, Du Maurier sighed and shook his head. It was not that he had anything to object to in Trixy’s choice of partner. ‘He’s a fine, clean-cut, upstanding young man,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he loves her and will take care of her. But it’s a wrench, you know, when the little girl you’ve been nourishing and tending and protecting for years is suddenly a woman, and doesn’t want your protection any more.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Henry sympathetically. ‘But that’s life, my dear chap. How else would the race be renewed?’

  ‘Yes, it’s life,’ said Du Maurier gloomily. ‘Ce n’est pas gai.’ It was one of his favourite expressions.

  ‘After all, you took Emma away from her father – and you told me yourself he put up quite a struggle.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Du Maurier admitted. ‘But I believe the old devil’s motives were entirely selfish – and her mother’s. He’d lost a lot of money, you know, and they were counting on Emma to look after them in their old age. They couldn’t see much prospect of that if she married me.’

  ‘Well, I daresay your mother shed a genuine tear when you married.’

  ‘Maman?’ Du Maurier was evidently amused at the thought. ‘The old lady wasn’t sentimental about such things. D’you know, when I was making myself ill with anxiety and frustration over our long engagement, she advised me to take a mistress – some little grisette, or the Cockney equivalent.’

  ‘You mean – instead of marrying?’ Henry was startled by this disclosure.

  ‘No – while I was waiting to be married,’ said Du Maurier, an idea which Henry found no less shocking. ‘Of course I told her it was out of the question,’ Du Maurier added quickly. ‘I told her – which was perfectly true – that I had made a vow in my heart of total fidelity to Pem, on the day we were engaged.’

  Henry had the sense, which he had experienced once or twice before, that his friend had inadvertently opened a cabinet drawer on contents slightly compromising to the owner, and quickly slammed it shut. A woman who could make such a cheerfully amoral suggestion to her son shattered all received notions of maternal love; and the vow Du Maurier referred to implied a less than chaste existence up to that point in his life – which wasn’t perhaps altogether surprising in someone who had been an art student in the Quartier Latin, but not the kind of behaviour one would have inferred from the irreproachable respectability of domestic life at New Grove House. The two men maintained a thoughtful silence as Du Maurier lit a cigarette.

  ‘Did you never think of marrying, James?’ he asked at length.

  ‘No, not really,’ he replied. ‘The only woman I might have married died young.’

  Du Maurier looked at him with interest. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘My cousin, Minny. Minny Temple. She was a very remarkable person.’

  ‘Beautiful?’

  Henry smiled. ‘I�
��m not sure whether she would have satisfied your – ah – exacting standards, Du Maurier. She was immensely attractive – vital – natural – almost boyish in looks, especially when she had her hair cut short because of illness. But it was for her ardent spirit that I loved her.’

  ‘You were both in love?’

  He shook his head. ‘It was never declared, on either side. We were both very young – in our early twenties – and she had many admirers. It was just after the end of the Civil War, you know, and there were several young men in our New England circle with heroic tales to tell. I had been excluded – that is exempted – excused – from military service, because of an injury to my back, which is still a cross I bear – so I felt a little, ah, intimidated – put in the shade, one might say – by these, these – bronzed and battle-scarred veterans. In short, I hung back. I didn’t assert myself. But I believe we were both aware that we had a special affinity, Minny and I. She had exceptional sensitivity – exceptional delicacy of feeling, and a – a – a—’ Henry stretched out an arm and groped with his hand as if to pluck the phrase he wanted out of the air – ‘a burning desire to do something great with her life.’

  ‘Like Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady?’

  ‘There is something of Minny in Isabel,’ Henry admitted. ‘She used to say that the remote possibility of the best thing was always better than a clear certainty of the second-best thing. She reminded me of that maxim in a letter shortly before her death. I’ve never forgotten it. In a way it has been the guiding light of my literary career.’

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘Consumption. At the age of twenty-five. I was in Europe at the time. I knew she was ill – but when the end came it was a great shock. We had been corresponding about the possibility of her coming to Italy – of our meeting in Rome. She said the mere thought of it made her “crazy” with excitement. But it was not to be.’

  ‘How very sad,’ said Du Maurier. ‘And there has never been another woman for whom you could feel the same attachment?’

  ‘No,’ said Henry.

  This story was almost true, and Henry almost believed it himself. He had certainly loved Minny Temple, but if he had been ‘in love’ with her, he would not have gone off to Europe when he did, or he would have made more determined efforts to bring her across the Atlantic to join him. In her last year of life she dropped some timid hints of more than cousinly feeling – ‘You don’t mind if I am a little affectionate, now that you are so far away, do you?’ – to which he did not rise; and in their correspondence he kept the prospect of a reunion in Rome dangling without ever taking the initiative to bring it about. When the news of her death reached him he had felt, therefore, as well as grief, a certain guilt, which he relieved by vowing to perpetuate her spirit in his work, especially in his heroines. The story he told George Du Maurier, and others, of young love cruelly nipped in the bud by fate, both explained and sanctified his celibate dedication to his art.

  2

  HENRY said nothing to Du Maurier about Constance Fenimore Woolson, in recent years the nearest thing in his life to what was vulgarly termed a ‘lady friend’. He could talk freely about Minny Temple because she was safely dead, but while they were alive Henry liked to keep his friends in watertight compartments, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups, so that information about himself should not leak from one to another. Writing fiction, however artful, was inevitably to some degree an exposure of the author’s own self, his own soul, and the fewer facts about one’s private life that one’s friends and the general public had in their possession, by the light of which to make comparisons and inferences, the better. Very few people in Henry’s large acquaintance were aware of his quite intimate relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson.

  She was the grandniece of Fenimore Cooper, that great, if (as he now seemed) quaintly archaic pioneer of the native American novel, creator of the much-loved Leatherstocking Tales and their frontiersman hero, Natty Bumppo. Constance had inherited her ancestor’s literary talent, but applied it to the domestic and sentimental aspects of life, in sketches and stories set in Ohio and the post-bellum South which were published with increasing frequency in the 1870s, in the same quality American magazines to which Henry contributed. In 1879 Harper’s began serialising a novel called Anne which was reputed to be exceptionally popular with the magazine’s readers. At about the same time she published a highly complimentary article about Henry’s work in the Atlantic. So he knew very well who she was when they met for the first time in Florence in the spring of 1880, and, as he told her, the letter of introduction which she presented, from Minny Temple’s sister, Henrietta, was hardly necessary.

  He discovered later that Miss Woolson had been carrying this letter about with her for months, vainly seeking an opportunity to use it. Making her first trip to Europe the previous December, with her sister Clara and the latter’s daughter Clare, she had gone initially to London, hoping to meet Henry there, but learned that he had left the city to spend Christmas in Paris. When she crossed the Channel to France in the New Year, he had moved on to Italy. But she had finally caught up with him at a time and place propitious to the development of a friendship. After literature, she told him, her greatest enjoyment had been from music, but she was getting sadly deaf, and as this source of pleasure inexorably diminished she aimed to compensate by learning to appreciate the visual arts, with which she had had little previous acquaintance. As he intended to stay in Florence for some weeks, he offered himself as her guide to the artistic treasures of the historic city. She accepted gratefully and with undisguised delight.

  He had come to Florence from Naples, where he had looked up Paul Zhukovski, a young aristocratic Russian expatriate whom he had got to know in Paris in the mid-’seventies, a would-be artist, a dilettante, a friend of Turgenev and a passionate admirer of the composer Richard Wagner. He and Zhukovski had in fact become very close at that time, going for long walks together, and spending hours talking about art and literature in the young Russian’s studio apartment, cluttered with treasures and curios he had collected in his cosmopolitan wanderings. Henry looked forward eagerly to their reunion at Posilippo, just outside Naples, where Zhukovski had taken a villa. He had settled there to be near Wagner, who was spending a year at the Villa Ungri with his wife, surrounded by an entourage of Russian and German admirers and hangers-on to whom Henry was quickly introduced. The atmosphere of decadence and vice that permeated this little court shocked Henry, and he stiffened in resistance to it with the strength of a conscience partly formed in puritan New England. There were men who painted themselves, and women who made lewd jokes; couples fondled each other openly in company, and sometimes they were of the same sex. When Zhukovski, at the end of a bibulous evening, attempted to kiss Henry on the mouth, he fled the place and never returned.

  It had not occurred to him in Paris that Zhukovski might be a Uranist, and he wondered anxiously, in retrospect, whether there had been anything in his own conduct there which could have encouraged such a supposition about himself. To be sure, he would sometimes link arms with the young Russian when they went for their long walks, or clasp him by the shoulder while making some particularly impassioned point in conversation, but this was surely no more than normal behaviour between young men who felt a strong affinity of interests and enjoyed each other’s company. It had never crossed his mind that their mutual attraction might turn morbid, and lead to unnatural and forbidden acts. Clearly whatever latent vice there had been in Zhukovski’s character had been brought out by his exposure to the unwholesome atmosphere of the Villa Ungri. Sitting in the first-class carriage of his train from Naples to Florence, gazing through the window at fields green with burgeoning crops, orchards and olive groves brilliant with blossom, and the slow procession of picturesque hill towns and villages in the middle distance, Henry reviewed the past and acquitted himself of any indiscreet or misleading behaviour.

  Meeting Constance Fenimore Woolson shortly afterwards coul
d not have been more timely. To be kind to her and, up to a safe point, gallant, was a way of confirming his sense of his own normality without making any emotional commitment. It was an ideal arrangement. Miss Woolson was very anxious to learn, and he was very willing to teach. She had the benefit of his superior knowledge of Italy and Italian art; he had a personable, cultivated, and impeccably respectable female companion. Henry showed her frescos, paintings and sculptures by the Italian masters and strove to educate her taste, which remained at times stubbornly provincial, but which she defended with spirit. She admitted, for instance, to a difficulty in appreciating the nude.