House of Wits by Paul Fisher

Author:Paul Fisher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2018-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

12

ABANDONMENT

The success of Daisy Miller in 1878 had emboldened Harry to begin an ambitious new novel. “I must try and seek a larger success than I have yet obtained,” he informed William Dean Howells in July 1879. He would most likely call it The Portrait of a Lady, as he told Howells and his English publisher, Sir Frederick Macmillan. He hoped the new book would be an antidote to recent works (The Europeans, 1878; Confidence, 1879; and A Bundle of Letters, 1879), whose sales had been “not brilliant.” Harry’s sales mattered to him as a point of personal pride but also because, now, he lived on literature, without loans or supplements from home. His impressive, unrelenting production barely kept him afloat, even though his Bolton Street household was hardly lavish. Yet Harry cared still more for fame, for the kind of recognition his father and William also craved, and which they gave only sparingly to Harry himself.

“Look out for my next big novel; it will immortalize me,” Harry exulted to his new friend, the Boston hostess and art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, who, like Harry, liked to think big. But he made this claim to “Mrs. Jack” in a moment of bravado; mostly he worked slowly and painfully, fretting about the success of his manuscripts. His royalties sustained the vital independence that protected him from family intrusion; he had “always to keep the pot a-boiling.”

But even when he was short on cash and longing for a more substantial version of his triumph with Daisy Miller, Harry found that his literary ambitions sometimes clashed with his social ones. In late June 1879, he left his writing desk to accept an invitation to spend a weekend at Twickenham, on the sweeps of the Thames just west of London, with Frances, Lady Waldegrave.

That Saturday, Harry got a lift from London in the fashionable gig of his friend Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, a young baronet with a passion for politics and—to judge from a later scandal—a weakness for women. Dilke relished procuring glamorous invitations for his American friend, and this weekend ranked highly—though, with Harry’s more conspicuous literary successes, he was increasingly easy to present in society. Many hostesses were curious to meet the charming author of The American and Daisy Miller, the subtle psychological novelist who could depict both sides of the Atlantic so vividly, and who could draw such fascinating portraits of women.

In the long-lasting daylight of late June, the two men drove up to an extraordinary villa—more of a palace really, bristling with turrets, towers, and peaked stained-glass windows, surrounded by lush lawns and well-tended gardens. This was the legendary Strawberry Hill, an early neo-Gothic masterpiece built in the mid-eighteenth century by the novelist and architectural enthusiast Horace Walpole, son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who would end his life as the Earl of Oxford. The Waldegrave family had since inherited the property, and the handsome and ambitious Lady Waldegrave, now fifty-eight years old and married for the fourth time, had

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