Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

James had long ago abandoned The Hero as the title of the play version of this tale, had added several extra dramatic—perhaps melodramatic—layers to the basic decision the hero had to make, and decided that amongst all these possible names for his hero, names filling two full pages in one of the thin notebooks he’d brought with him, he had liked “Domville” the best. It had taken him longer to come up with the eponymous leading character’s first name—at one time he’d toyed with “Boy” just because he liked the sound of it—but for the last few months it had solidified into “Guy”. Guy Domville . Obviously this was no longer a play set in Venice.

But would the male—and very masculine—protagonist’s heroic act consist of consenting to a loveless marriage (a marriage into which a villain with the villainous name of Devenish was trying to ensnare Guy Domville) or would his character resist this temptation and renounce life, love, family, and any future for his noble family’s name by returning to Holy Orders and cold celibacy?

Lying there in John Hay’s guest room in the near-darkness, the small pool of light from his bedside lamp illuminating only his pale hands and the small pile of his notebooks, James imagined that the double-renunciation at the end of the play would bring tears to sensitive souls in the audience. He could imagine his elaborately dressed actor saying loudly—“I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles!” Everyone in the theater would either weep or be struck into awed silence.

But would they?

James felt like weeping. He wished Sherlock Holmes would return.

On the next day, Saturday morning, precisely one week before his dreaded birthday, having just finished breakfast—Gregory had whisked the tray away with his usual silent efficiency when James had rung the little bell—and dressed in his finely tailored brown pinstripe suit and waistcoat, Henry James sat in the spring sunlight at the table near the open window of his wonderful guest suite and wrote the following:

Among the delays, the disappointments, the déboires of the horrid theatric trade nothing is so soothing as to remember that literature sits patient at my door, and that I have only to lift the latch to let in the exquisite little form that is, after all, nearest to my heart and with which I am so far from having done. I let it in, the old brave hours come back; I live them over again—I add another little block to the small literary monument that it has been given to me to erect.

James paused and looked at what he had just written. It was hogwash. Sentimental hogwash. He had committed himself to making his fortune writing for the theater and there was no little latch he could lift that would let his cozy—and financially unrewarding—literary efforts come tip-toeing back in.

And what was this self-serving babble about building a “small literary monument” for himself, block by block? Flaubert had answered that conceit rather concisely with his comment—“Books are made not like children but like pyramids and they’re just as useless. And they stay in the desert. Jackals piss at their foot and the bourgeois climb up on them.”

Henry James would soon turn fifty and while he’d sown his literary wild oats with both abandon and determined discipline, at this dark moment he doubted very much if any of his literary children would outlive him. At least by not much more than a few years at best.

Even his attempts to get his peers—or at least his younger literature-oriented male friends—to call him “Master”—Maître—had failed. If they did so, at his actual urgings, they made it into something like a joke. No, there was no “literary monument” out there for him or of him, no monument built “block by block” by his patient workmanship. And for the temporary “monuments” he’d labored so hard to construct, the critic-jackals were indeed pissing on them, the tiresome bourgeois—especially in America—clambering over his blocks and scratching their initials in his oh-so-carefully-cut stones with nails and knives.

Just last year he’d written a story he’d very much liked titled “The Wheel of Time”. In it his main character, yet another reflection of himself as seen through a glass darkly, thinks much about his distant youth while musing on his forty-ninth birthday. About youth . . .

He regretted it, he missed it, he tried to beckon it back; but the differences in London made him feel that it had gone forever. There might perhaps be some compensation in being fifty, some turn of the dim telescope, some view from the brow of the hill; it was a round, gross, stupid number, which probably would make one pompous, make one think one’s self venerable. Meanwhile, at any rate, it was odious to be forty-nine.

But with that round, odious number of 50 now bearing down on him like a freight train in the night—just as impervious, just as terrifying, just as unavoidable—he would pay anything to remain forty-nine forever or, if that was not possible, at least for another few un-passing years.

James realized to his horror that he was close to tears. Maybe that young, pink American pig named Teddy Roosevelt had been right; perhaps he was effeminate in his thoughts and writings.

James was aching to write someone a letter. But he couldn’t, shouldn’t . . . this trip to America was to remain a secret from his friends and epistolary interlocutors.

More hogwash. He was a man of letters in more than the literary sense. Henry James wrote a letter to someone, usually multiple letters to multiple someones, every day of his life. In a real sense, writing and receiving letters was the way he kept in touch with life.

At the moment he felt an overwhelming need to write a letter to Constance Fenimore Woolson about what had happened to him over the past few weeks. He knew that Fenimore had turned fifty-three last month in March—he’d written her a clever letter offering his elliptical birthday wishes—so she might understand his feelings about turning fifty. To his recollection, they’d never discussed the topic of aging. Fenimore—an American writer like James, in self-exile in Europe for decades—was the focus of the closest thing to a romantic relationship with a woman that James had ever felt or allowed.

Of course, he really had no romantic notions about Fenimore, certainly no sensual or sexual ones—the thought of an unclad woman’s body appealed to him only in a very few classical paintings and sculptures. It was the nude male form that moved James in some deep, solid, but uncertain way—ever since that day he walked into his brother William’s Newport art group’s life-drawing class and saw their cousin Gus standing there naked as the model. But at one point, for weeks when both of them were staying in Fenimore’s rented chalet of Bellosguardo high above Venice, Fenimore in her rooms upstairs and James comfortably in his apartment on the lowest floor, he’d had some sense of what it might be like to live with a woman.

To be married.

Of course Fenimore was so masculine in so many ways—fiercely independent, achingly but muscularly ambitious as a writer and poet in her own right, willing to break off even the most delightful conversation with James while sitting on the wide terrace of the Villa Brichieri near Bellosguardo watching a sunset in order to get back to her writing—but she was also a woman with a woman’s mysteries. It had taken James months after Fenimore had left her leased home in Oxford before he realized that she’d come there—to the winter darkness of England which depressed her so, she needed sunlight or her moods would plummet—to be near him while his sister Alice was dying.