Venice was laden down with old voices, old echoes and images; it was the refuge of endless strange secrets, broken fortunes and wounded hearts. Five years earlier, having sorted out the affairs of his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson, he had left the city believing that he would not return. It was as if both he and Constance had risked too much in their gamble with Venice, and she had lost everything while he had lost her. Venice ’s resonance for him now was no longer vague and historical; the violence and cruelty which matched the beauty and grandeur were no longer abstract. They were represented by the violent death of his friend. As guest of his hosts the Curtises in Palazzo Barbaro, he worked on a new story in one of the rooms at the back, with a pompous painted ceiling and walls of ancient pale green damask slightly shredded and patched. He knew that just a few rooms away glowed the Grand Canal. If he stood on the balcony, as he had done so many times, he could study the domes and scrolls and scalloped buttresses and statues forming the crown of the Salute, the wide steps like the train of a robe. He could look up to the left and allow himself to be dazzled by Palazzo Dario covered with the loveliest marble plates and sculptured circles, exquisite and compact and delicate.
In that turning of his head from the Salute to Palazzo Dario, his eye was caught each time by the gloomy Gothic windows of Casa Semitecolo and this was when Venice ceased to be spectacle for him, when it abandoned its guise as vast pageant and became real and hard and filled with horror. It was from the second story of this building, five years earlier, that Constance Fenimore Woolson had flung herself onto the pavement.
HE HAD FIRST met her early in 1880 in Florence when he was writing The Portrait of a Lady. He was thirty-seven; she was forty. She had had a letter of introduction from Minny Temple ’s sister Henrietta. While she had read everything he had written, he had read nothing by her. He had met many American women travelling in Europe with letters of introduction to him. Such letters, if gathered together, he thought, would produce a hefty volume, but they would not be as tedious as many of their bearers, who included a number of lady novelists who wished that they had written Daisy Miller and were anxious to tell him that they were on the point of doing something quite as good.
Constance ’s deafness in one ear interested him as much as it seemed to irritate her. It pointed to something he might otherwise not have noticed so quickly. She possessed an extraordinary amount of reserve and self-sufficiency and seemed anxious neither to please him nor impress him. She lived, to a degree which he believed unusual, in her own mind. He was not surprised, as he showed her the sights, that she wished to avoid tourists, but he was fascinated by her lack of interest in Anglo-American society in Florence and her refusal to be introduced to his friends and associates in the higher echelons of Florentine society. She needed her evenings to herself, she said flatly; she could not happily absorb the company of so many people, no matter how rich and important they were.
He was unable to tell whether her responses to churches and frescoes and paintings were truly original. Nonetheless, the freshness of her intelligence, her likes and dislikes, and her ability to be puzzled and confused, made him interested in accompanying her through the city in the mornings. Two years later, when she read The Portrait of a Lady, she noticed, she intimated to him softly, his skill at displaying an American woman full of openness and curiosity and ideas of her own in Italy for the first time being quietly but firmly directed by a connoisseur, a man of slender means who had studied beauty. He had used that sense of her, attached it, as it were, to his other prior claimants, and written it sometimes on the very same day that he wandered in the city with his new American friend. So that Isabel Archer saw what Constance Fenimore Woolson saw and may indeed have felt what she felt, if only he could have fully divined what Constance felt.
She teased him about the tameness of his background; his being a native of the James family caused her much amusement, as did Newport and Boston and his European wanderings. She, the grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, had access to an America he would never know. Both in Ohio and Florida, she told him, she had been on familiar terms with the wilderness. And just in case, she smiled at him menacingly, he thought that she was a roughneck, she should point out that, while he was the first of his family to set foot in Italy, her great-uncle had lived in Florence and written a book about it.
Added to her background was her strange and busy independence. She saw him in the mornings, but in the afternoons she walked in the hills above Florence for hours, and at night she wrote and read. Each day, when they met, she had a new perspective on the city, a new experience to recount, and a fresh eye with which to view what he had arranged for her to see.
He did not mention her in letters to his parents or his sister Alice or brother William. In those years, they were all too ready to respond to the slightest hint of an amorous adventure which might lead him to marriage. He knew that every line of his letters was carefully analysed in case some clue might be offered about where his heart lay. For his relatives in Boston, hungry for news, his heart remained as hard as he could make it.
Constance and Henry met when their paths crossed in Rome and then in Paris. They corresponded over the next few years and read each other’s work. Sometimes, he was preoccupied with his own writing or with other correspondents, but often when he had written her a letter he discovered that his old enjoyment of her company had been stirred again; he found himself writing another letter to her before he received a reply. He feared that she was confused by this sudden interest after a long silence and he knew that she was wary. She had become his most intelligent reader and, after he had extracted a promise that she would destroy his letters, a most trusted and sharp-witted confidante. And when she came to London, as she did when they had known one another for more than three years, she became his steadfast and self-contained and secret best friend.
Neither of them spoke about their private lives, their hidden selves. He spoke to her about his work and his family and she made observations which were personal in that they belonged to a very particular mind; they seemed like confidences no matter how general or vague the subject. She did not talk about her work to him, but he learned by implication and accident that the completion of each of her books brought with it a nervous collapse of which she lived in dread. The winters were not kind to her; dark days and low temperatures made her depressed so that there were times when she could not get out of bed, could not see him or anybody else, could not work, and could, as far as he could discover, see no hope, although she was desperate for him not to know the scale and depth of her suffering. She, who had been ready for his friendship and company, could be silent and withdrawn. He had never met anyone who shared to such a degree this readiness and its very opposite. He knew that he could trust her, that he could remain close to her while becoming distant, if he needed. She had a way of abruptly leaving his side as though she feared he was about to dismiss her and could not tolerate the pain and the humiliation of that. Nothing she did with him was simple; he was amazed and often concerned that he did not fully know her, could not fathom if these brisk gestures at parting were aspects of her vulnerability or her need to be alone, or her fear, or all of these things.
ONE EVENING in London in February 1884, Henry went with Mrs Kemble to see the Italian actor Salvini in Othello. It was a fashionable evening and a fashionable production and there were people there who were richer than Mrs Kemble and her escort, with titles and also beauty, neither of which Mrs Kemble nor her escort possessed, but there was no couple more fashionable in the audience, more noticed and observed, than the great actress accompanied by the author of The Portrait of a Lady.