The CEA Forum

Winter/Spring 2005: 34.1

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Book Review:

Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899-1915. Edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004.

by Sean O'Toole, Graduate Center, The City University of New York

The question of how to read Henry James's intimate correspondence with younger men has been a topic of vehement recent debate and fictional re-imagining in far-ranging places such as the Times Literary Supplement and Colm Tóibín's engrossing new novel The Master. Italian scholar Rosella Mamoli Zorzi is the latest to enter the fray with her edition of James's letters to one young man in particular, the Norwegian-American sculptor Hendrik C. Andersen. Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899-1915 brings together for the first time all seventy-eight of the letters known to exist, including some previously overlooked. While many of these letters are already in print—in Leon Edel's encyclopedic Henry James: Letters (1974-84) and, more recently, in Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe's Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James's Letters to Younger Men (2001)—this collection isolates the intense emotional, erotic, and artistic bond that James shared with Andersen. In the end, this edition can be no less inconclusive about James's sexuality (indeed, it was so productively indeterminate), but Zorzi does succeed in elevating what has heretofore been an interesting but piecemeal correspondence to the status of a significant, even signal, part of James's life. It finally makes vivid, and readily available, what Edel has suggestively called “a quality of passion and possession” in the letters to Andersen, a freedom rarely found elsewhere in James's correspondence.

James met Andersen in Rome in the spring of 1899 and, by all accounts, was much taken by his blond good looks, strapping frame, and strong, vigorous hands. Andersen must have been eerily reminiscent of the beautiful fictional sculptor James created almost a quarter-century earlier in Roderick Hudson (1875). He would also have reminded James of a younger version of himself spending time in Rome as an ambitious young artist in 1869. The two would meet only a half-dozen times between 1899 and James's death in 1916, but their relationship deepened nonetheless through a frequent and often passionate correspondence. James likely burned his letters from Andersen on the grate at Lamb House, as was his habit, but Andersen kept his. The result is an intimate if one-sided view of the nature and contours of the relationship.

Many of these letters show James offering advice and encouragement to the young artist while overflowing with expressions of love for him and brooding in the ache of his absence. Here we see not just another “Jamesian self,” as Millicent Bell claims in the first of the book's two painfully cautious introductions, but something closer to John Carlos Rowe's definition of an “other” Henry James: “master” of the novel, for sure, but also vulnerable, sexually anxious, and lonely. Just as Roderick and Rowland had, Andersen and James talk about art, career, discipline, and how to succeed in the world. James seems to hover over his protégé in these letters, chiding him for his poor spelling, dictating train schedules and arrival details, and warning Andersen against an impractical grandiosity. When Andersen remains aloof or refuses to follow his directions (he visits James at Lamb House only four times and ultimately pursues building a fantastic “world city” for his monumental nude sculptures), James is noticeably crestfallen.

What really sets these letters apart, however, is James's strikingly free language of physical touch, the reiterated verbal embraces, laying on of hands, and pattings on the back: “I hold you close,” “I feel my dear boy, my arms around you,” “I meanwhile pat you affectionately on the back, across the Alps and Apennines, I draw you close, I hold you long,” “Always grasping you hard and holding you close, I am yours, dearest Hendrik immensely,” “I pat you on the back tenderly, tenderly,” “I take you, my dear old Boy, to my heart, & beg you to feel my arms around you,” “I put, my dear boy, my arm around you, & feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of our excellent future & your admirable endowment,” “lean on me as on a brother and a lover.”

Then there is James's repeated cry of loneliness in the wake of Andersen's rare and fleeting visits. Consider this passage, written after Andersen's first visit to Lamb House in the blissful summer of 1899:

I was absurdly sorry to lose you when, that afternoon of last month, we walked sadly to the innocent and kindly little station together and our common fate growled out of the harsh false note of whirling you untimely away. Since then I have missed you out of all proportion to the three meager little days (for it seems strange they were only that ) that we had together. I have never (and I've done it three or four times) passed the little corner where we came up Udimore hill (from Winchelsea), in the eventide on our bicycles, without thinking ever so tenderly of our charming spin homeward in the twilight and feeling again the strange perversity it made of that sort of thing being so soon over . Never mind – we shall have more, lots more, of that sort of thing!

The absences in the letters to Andersen are just as interesting as the expressions of love and longing, and perhaps more telling. Besides James's often brilliant statements about art, the scope of these letters is extremely constricted. Unlike in his other correspondence of the time, there is no mention of the arduous task of revision for the New York Edition of his works, nor of the Prefaces , which James was carrying out during these years. There is very little mention of James's active social life, and most notably no reference to the circle of queer friends that had begun to gather around James, including the overtly gay Howard Sturgis, the bisexual Morton Fullerton (who would become Edith Wharton's lover), the handsome Anglo-Irish man-about-town Jocelyn Persse, and the young gay novelist Hugh Walpole. Likewise, Andersen's name hardly appears at all in James's wider correspondence. Surely, as Bell points out, James would have known too well what this crowd would readily understand about his attachment.

Instead, in these letters we catch James's eye looking at the personal photos sent by Andersen, his “Bearded Bandit” in one full-length portrait, and numerous studio photos of works in progress. We hear James's critiques of the work mingled with outpourings of affection, verbal touching, and campy pet names like “Belovedest” and “Darling darling.”

Whether or not any of this epistolary passion was, in Edel's famous words, “acted out,” James's letters to Andersen show that the desire was unmistakably there, and it was openly expressed. One wonders, of course, what calling another man “darling darling” is if not a sexual performance or, in the years following the Wilde trial, what could be more bold an “act” than committing that desire to writing. But, indeed, the was-he-or-wasn't-he epistemological tussle that this debate so often gets reduced to threatens to obscure the most important point of this correspondence: Toward the end of his life, Henry James found himself in love with another man and wrote “long past midnight” letters to him. These letters present a range of interpretive possibilities and a series of additional questions. Not the least of these questions concerns the presence of a queer force in James's writing and the impact of his romantic longings on his celebrated “late” style, including three of his greatest novels: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Beloved Boy should go a long way toward making new readings of James not only more possible but more likely. Perhaps Michael Moon has put it best when he writes that if we make anything less of that queer force than James himself did, “it is our failure of nerve and imagination, not his.”

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