1804
PARTISAN REVIEW
ways with him. Americans did not sufficiently appreciate
his
tribute;
and
the Cambridge circle remained, or he seems to have thought it
remained, keenly vigilant of his activities. We shall return to that
in
a moment. Meanwhile, as his letters and even more
his
notebook en–
tries testify, he was expanding like someone who had broken through
the major confinements of his youth.
In 1881 he confided
to
his notebook a rapid summary of his
English life so far. The passage, all but unique in James, is in a
fluid easy prose, its keynote being a kind of breathless joy-with
compunctious undertones- in his enchanted mobility: it looks for–
ward to the pleasure-sad prose of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Al–
though settled in London, he continues to travel in Britain as well as
on the Continent. He has begun his practice of confining his jour–
neys to France, Italy, and Germany---expansion must stop somewhere.
Yet a friend, whom he fails to identify, "gave me the nostalgia of
the sun, of the south, of colour, of freedom, of 'being one's own master,
and doing absolutely what one pleases. He used to say, 'I know surh
a sunny corner, under the south wall of old Toledo. There's a wild
fig tree growing there; I have lain on the grass, with my guitar.' "
But this friend- surely an American !-goes to places "simply hr
their own sake, and without making any use of it- that, with him,
is a passion," James notes with some astonishment. He must put this
delightful vagabond in a book, he concludes, as if to remind him–
self of his responsibilities.
"Prolonged idleness exasperates and depresses me," he wrote.
And he was constantly at work on something, often turning his travels
into copy for American periodicals, the manuscript of the
Portrait
accompanying him from country-house to country-house and hotel
to hotel through England, Scotland, France, Italy. With the
in–
creased demand for his fiction, writing became ever more of a stren–
uous routine; it also remained an intimate rite, a
fOIm
of daily
self-communion and spiritual exercise.
The vogue of the "serial" was still in force. Beginning with the
Portrait,
James produced a succession of lengthy novels (together with
many shorter things) which came out in installments in the
Atlantic
or the
Comhill, Scribner's
or the
Century.
Many times the initial
chapters appeared before the novel was half finished. This was nerve–
racking for him, but it had distinguished precedents in the profession
