This study challenges the notion that closeted secrecy was a necessary part of social life for gay men living in the shadow of the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. It reconstructs a surprisingly open network of queer filiation in which Henry James occupied a central place. The lives of its satellite figures — most now forgotten or unknown — offer even more suggestive evidence of some of the countervailing forms of social practice that could survive even in that hostile era. If these men enjoyed such exemption largely because of the prerogatives of class privilege, their relative freedom was nevertheless a visible rebuke to the reductive stereotypes of homosexuality that circulated and were reinforced in the culture of the period. This bookwill be of particular interest to scholars of Henry James and queer studies, readers of late Victorian and modern literature, and those interested in the history and social construction of gender roles.
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The history of the placement of a memorial tablet honoring Henry James in Chelsea Old Church, London (and the proposal to efface it).
Keywords
Henry JamesMemorialDeath maskHarry JamesJohn BorieVictor Beigel
End Abstract
After Henry James suffered a series of strokes in December 1915, his sister-in-law, Alice Howe Gibbens James (the widow of brother William ) braved the wartime Atlantic crossing to attend to the writer’s inevitable downlying. In doing so, she was defying not only the German submarines lurking beneath the surface but also the stubborn counsel of her own children. Her eldest son, Henry James III (“Harry”), had known first-hand what a difficult patient his uncle could be; five years before, after having lapsed into an abyss of deep depression, the author had clung to this nephew in a “frenzy of despair”1—and Harry now stressed to his siblings that their mother would not be able to bear up unaided in these even worse circumstances. “Unless Uncle Henry goes with absolute suddenness,” he warned, “his final breaking up is going to require a very arduous period of watching and comforting by some-one. If it looks like that I should say go—But, then Mama must not go alone.”2 When Alice’s letters and cables grimly confirmed that their relative surely was dying, first daughter Margaret (“Peggy”) and then Harry came to London to see their mother through the ordeal. The novelist lingered until the end of February of the following year, by which point Harry had been obliged to cross the Channel to continue his work for the Rockefeller Foundation’s War Relief Commission. But Peggy would stay with Alice in England until the end of the summer, helping her see to the immediate funeral arrangements and the disposition of James’s literary and personal estate.
Also coming to their aid was the family of John Singer Sargent—especially his two sisters, Emily and Violet (now Madame Ormond)—who lived just doors away from James’s flat at 21 Carlyle Mansions. Emily, who resided at #10, had been the writer’s helpful neighbor ever since he signed the lease for his perch in Chelsea in 1912, and she frequently asked him to join her (and often her brother) for tea or an evening’s repast. When he gladly accepted one these invites in 1914, James couldn’t help ejaculating, “it seems to me that at this rate it’s you and John who give all my dinners!”3 (Entries in the writer’s pocket diaries document more than thirty such occasions over a span of four years—and that record is almost certainly incomplete).4 In this last phase of James’s declining health, the Sargents were no less attentive. The author’s amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet (1880–1961), noted in her diary that the two sisters came to stay with James the night after he collapsed from his second stroke, and they were seldom away from his residence in the weeks to come. Always the provider, some days later Emily “came round with jellies and oysters,” and then sent ice cream (“after hearing that was the only sort of food H.J. would look at”).5 She was present at the hour of the author’s death on 28 February, and all three Sargents sat with Mrs. James and Peggy in the front pew at his funeral four days later .
When that service was ended, Emily and Violet accompanied the Jameses to the outlying crematorium at Golders Green (at the farthest fringe of Hampstead Heath), where, following the instructions in his last will and testament, Henry James’s body was to be reduced to ashes. Knowing that this was to happen, Alice had, in the days before, wanted to preserve some vestige of her brother-in-law’s physical form. “There is something so divinely innocent in his face,” she wrote to her second son; “[h]e has done good to all men, all the days of his life, a lonely being with all the sad insight into other hearts.”6 When his heart at last gave out, and James’s body was laid out to view, the impulse materially to consecrate his dying moment was irresistible. At the urging of John Singer Sargent, arrangements quickly were made to have a death mask of the author’s face molded in plaster . As Alice wrote to Harry
And there Henry lies in the front room among his books and laurel wreaths with the most unearthly beauty in his face. It is so young—his vanished youth has come back with an expression of wisdom and of grandeur which it breaks my heart not to have you all see. Mr Sargent said it must be kept and sent a man as soon as I agreed. (which you may believe I instantly did, to take a cast).7
Somewhat uncannily, many who came to see the plaster mask confirmed the writer’s resemblance to Napoleon —“very grand with a look of immense power”—unaware that, in his last ramblings of consciousness, James had assumed the guise of the French Emperor, issuing instructions for the renovation of the Louvre and the Tuilleries, metaphorically spreading the plumes of the imperial eagle (Fig. 1.1).8
Fig. 1.1
The hardened bachelor: facial plaster cast of Henry James at the time of his death (Houghton 45Z-1a), Houghton Library, Harvard University
Knowing the writer’s intentions for the ultimate disposition of his body, at first James’s relatives considered having his funeral service in the chapel at Golders Green. But the author’s attending physician, Dr. Harold A. Des Voeux , advised them that the crematorium “was too far away for the many busy men who would want to attend,” and he urged them instead to engage the rector of Chelsea Old Church, just a few short blocks from Carlyle Mansions.9 Some of the writer’s close friends had approached the Dean of Westminster Abbey, hoping that James’s final rites could be conducted in that most venerable of English cathedrals; but they were told that a memorial service there could only be held “at the request of the Crown or the Government,” and even an ordinary public funeral would cost £100.10 Possibly shuddering at that expense, Alice instead followed Des Voeux’s counsel and telephoned Mr. Farmer, the rector of Chelsea Old Church—“such a good man, so much better than his sermon!”11—with whom she confirmed the order of the service, after insisting upon certain changes in the traditional Anglican ritual and specifying which hymns were to be sung by the choir. On 3 March, the sanctuary was decked with wreaths of flowers and its pews filled with mourners; to Edmund Gosse, the occasion seemed a living counterpart to James’s haunting masterpiece, “The Altar of the Dead ”; afterward, someone caught the parting words of Rudyard Kipling , who said it was “the most touchingly beautiful service” he had ever heard.12
Two days later, Archdeacon Henry Bevan (who had presided with prosaic Mr. Farmer at the funeral) came to Carlyle Mansions to offer the family space for a memorial tablet to be placed in the Old Church (“something which they permit only as an exception,” Alice noted). James’s sister-in-law promptly accepted the idea and asked her sons “to compose the wording of it.”13Since she and Peggy planned to stay in England for several more months, they felt no need to make hasty decisions about the exact nature of the commemorative marker. After having some time to consider various alternatives, two weeks later Alice declared her preference for an “old stone” (“if we can find one”); a brass tablet, she felt, would be “too much like a label—not for this venerable church.”14 The following month she affirmed this partiality, especially since the rector had agreed to allow the tablet to be placed in the More Chapel of the Old Church, a sanctum of especially hallowed distinction. “I am looking at all the 18th Century tablets in these old churches,” she told Billy (her second son, who was himself an artist), “some of them very beautiful in their simplicity and beautiful lettering.” She repeated her desire for an “old” stone—“yellowed marble if I can get it”—and urged her son to consult with other family members about the inscription. “We must have something more than name and dates,” she insisted .15
Whether the others in America passed on their ideas or suggestions is unclear, as n...
