The art of memory in James's "The Tone of Time" - Articles - Henry James

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1998 by V. John Vacca

Henry James's "The Tone of Time" was published in November 1900 in Scribner's Magazine. Collected in The Better Sort in 1903, it was not included in the New York edition. Rarely commented on, perhaps the story will garner more critical attention as editions of James's complete stories become more readily available.

The origins of "The Tone of Time" are recorded in James's Notebooks. Paul Bourget related a story to James told to him by Luigi Gualdo about a childless couple requesting aportrait of a child "since they want one and can't come by it otherwise." Thinking that Gualdo had actually written such a story, James was reluctant to develop this intriguing idea himself. In fact, he was relieved to learn that no published story existed (Matthiessen and Murdock 302). James began, but never finished, his own story based on Gualdo's idea. Instead, as Leon Edel notes in his introduction in Stories of the Supernatural, James "contrived two variant situations" (598). One variant became "Maud-Evelyn," about Marmaduke, a young man who comes to believe the suggestion of an old couple that he is actually the husband of their dead daughter. The other became "The Tone of Time." James's Notebooks show the germ of the idea in his entry for 7 May 1898:

   The woman who wants to have been married--to have become a widow. She may
   come ... to the painter to have the portrait painted.... The painter does
   it. Very pretty too I think. (Matthiessen and Murdock 265-66)

In February 1899, James's notebook entry outlines the plot, largely as it exists in the story he wrote, with two exceptions: the "widow" does not approach the woman painter with her request for a portrait, and there is no climactic meeting between the two when the portrait is hung in the artist's home (283-84).

Leon Edel remarks on James's fascination with Gualdo's portrait story:

   The theme haunted him for good reason. It contained in it the elements of
   many old fantasies on the theme of death-in-life and life-in-death, people
   who are physically alive and emotionally dead. (Stories 599)

In The Treacherous Years, Edel comments on a basic similarity found in stories like "The Two Faces," "The Special Type," "The Beldonald Holbein," "Broken Wings," and "The Tone of Time," all written about the same time. They reveal "the anger he felt at William's seeming hostility to his acquisition of a home--anger that he could not discharge more directly, since his brother was seriously ill" (324). These late stories, for Edel, mirror James's own conflicts:

   what matters are the emotions they incarnate--old love, old jealousy, old
   anger--of the little Henry who yearned with all the intensity of his being
   for acceptance by his brother. (326)

"The Tone of Time" presents a narrator who is an artist looking back on a curious and revealing experience in his life. At the beginning of the story, he visits Mary Tredick, an artist and old friend, to ask her to take an assignment not right for him: to paint a portrait without a sitter of "a handsome, distinguished, agreeable man, of not more than forty, clean-shaven, thoroughly well-dressed, and a perfect gentleman" (306). Mary agrees reluctantly, but the project, once begun, absorbs her. When the narrator shows Mrs. Bridgenorth, his client, the finished portrait, she has a "strange recognition," but also a "blind suspicion" (316)--suspecting that the artist knew this person. The man in the painting looks too much like Bridgenorth's deceased lover not to have been known by Mary. The narrator assures her that it is just a coincidence. When Bridgenorth doubles the amount of money she had originally agreed to pay, Mary guesses that Bridgenorth is the woman who took the man she loved--the man she painted--away from her. Despite the fact that Bridgenorth has left a check for the painting with the narrator, Mary retrieves the painting while the narrator is away from his studio. The money returned by the narrator, Mary thanks him for his efforts on her behalf, but cherishes the prospect of keeping the portrait and the mixed memories it evokes. Mary ultimately bequeaths the painting to the narrator, who can only guess at all of the complex meanings that it holds.

In "The Tone of Time," the portrait precipitates the action of the story and functions as the central symbol, revealing each of the three main characters. For Bridgenorth, a woman in her fifties, the narrator believes the portrait is meant "to represent, to symbolise, as it were, her husband, who's not alive and who perhaps never was" (307). Bridgenorth plans to put the portrait in "a boudoir at the back"; the narrator knows that the portrait will be "tastefully enshrined there" (311). Refusing to tell the narrator who the subject is, Bridgenorth asks him never to tell Mary "he was ever anything to me" (318). In reality, Bridgenorth claims that she was planning to marry the man had he lived. Suddenly, art has recreated the past for her: "The burden of the backward years ... lived again" (317).

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The art of memory in James's "The Tone of Time" - Articles - Henry James

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1998 by V. John Vacca

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