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

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).

For Mary Tredick, the portrait represents a recapturing of her power as an artist and the intensity of a love from her past. In this respect, the portrait revitalizes and transforms her. At the beginning of the story, Mary is "a little tired, a little old" (306). Her "renunciation" is seen in her unattractive paint-splattered apron and in her life: "she had given up everything but her work" (306). Hesitant at first about the project, Mary is soon smiling "with a light distinctly new" (310). The narrator is surprised that she is not working from sketches; he asks, "So that it's all memory?" Her reply is even more surprising: "It's all hate!" (314). To the narrator Mary reveals her relation to the man of the painting and her apparent connection to Bridgenorth, who she claims she does not know personally: "She tried to make him marry her, and he was very near it. Death, however, saved him.... She was the reason he failed me" (323). She is also the reason Mary will finally refuse to sell the painting: "I had so blindly and strangely given him back to her" (324). Mary denies that she is jealous, and the narrator decides not to pursue the matter; her look "placed her quite on the other side of the gulf of time. She was firm there; ... I couldn't get at her now" (324). Despite acknowledging that pain and bitterness propelled the creation of the portrait, she clings to the contradiction: "I shall keep it in joy" (325).

For the narrator, the portrait represents what he asks Mary to invest it with: the tone of time. At the end of the story, the narrator sits looking at the painting and telling his story. The portrait "has a charm that ... still stirs my imagination" (313). Part of that charm is its image of youth, "the joy and pride of life" (313). Part of it, too, is the portrait's reminder of the artist. If Bridgenorth recalls the quest "for propriety, the real thing" (308), Mary herself remains the real thing. Bridgenorth, even with her carriage and "very good lace," is nevertheless "vague" and "without credentials" (308). For Mary, struggling bravely, with her card "manfully on the door" (306) of her studio, the narrator becomes the merchant of art as he encourages Bridgenorth's increasing generosity. At the end, he is left to confront Mary's anguish embedded in the portrait: "I have inherited the picture, in the deep beauty of which, however, darkness still lurks" (325). He acknowledges in his remark that no one has ever recognized the subject of the portrait, but his statement also recalls his earlier surmise that Mary's creation of the tone of time grew out of "smothered passion" and "remembered wrong" (313).

If Bridgenorth and Mary see the portrait as something other than what it is, the narrator sees it primarily as a flawed but beautiful work of art. The narrator's realism makes him the most balanced of these three characters in the story and the right intermediary between two passions. He can respect Bridgenorth's privacy while getting the best price for Mary. He can recognize the illusions of these two women without passing judgment. He is also at home with his own limitations. He thinks of Mary to do the portrait because his art is the craft of the concrete: "What am I good for in the world but just the impression of the given, the presented case: I can do but the face I see" (307). Seven years after the publication of "The Real Thing," James gives us a character who receives from Bridgenorth the sort of request that the narrator of the earlier story expects to receive from the Monarchs. The narrator of "The Real Thing" derides the work he is doing, dismissing his illustrations as "pot boilers" (34) and art that amounts to a "second-rate trick" (57). Although he thinks that he is better than the work he is doing, he does admit that there were times when "it was a comfort to have the real thing under one's hand" (50). Presumably, the narrator of "The Tone of Time" would take these words as his credo.

If James owes something to Gualdo for his story centered on a portrait, he may have had Edgar Allan Poe on his mind, too, for his conception of a work of art that represents the living dead, a deceased man as a vital presence on a canvas. Mary has gotten a sense of life into her portrait that surprises the narrator:

   She had suffered from him, it came to me, the worst that a woman can
   suffer, and the wound he had dealt her, though hidden, had never
   effectively healed. It had bled again while she worked. (315)

The narrator calls the result "a breathing masterpiece" (320). Although James was not fond of the Gothic excesses of Edgar Allan Poe, he praised his craft. As a child, James read and recited "The Raven," and he knew Poe's tales. In "The Tone of Time," with its narrative of lost love and the ravages of memory, James echoes "The Raven." (1) In his depiction of a portrait invested with life, James echoes Poe's "The Oval Portrait," a story he may very well have known. Titled "Life in Death" in its first published version (1842), it relates a story of a painting of a young woman viewed by a wounded, delirious, and, at least in the first version, opium-eating narrator. The narrator is spellbound by its "absolute life-likeliness of expression" (67). The painting is a "proof not less of the power of the painter than of the deep love for her" (67) In subjecting his wife to the debilitating atmosphere of his studio and the rigor of his obsessive schedule, he causes her death even as he recreates life. "The Tone of Time" can be seen as a Jamesian twist on the Poe story. Just as the portrait is alive to the narrator of Poe's story, so Mary's portrait is alive to her. Mary Tredick brings her lover back from the dead through the power of her love and hate in painting the portrait. If she cannot restore the past, she can at least elevate her renunciation to art and create life from death.

In "The Tone of Time," the pervading atmosphere is one of passivity--until the portrait is begun and completed. It becomes the catalyst for change, or, at least, the illusion of change. Three years before "The Beast in the Jungle," James gives us characters stuck in time. Mary has subsumed her life in her art, stopped by her lover's betrayal. Bridgenorth attempts to secure the past even more rightly as she moves forward with her charade of widowhood. Like John Marcher in "The Beast in the Jungle," she is mysteriously expectant, as the narrator remarks: "She gave me more than anything else the sense simply of waiting.... She was waiting for something to happen--for something to come" (311-12). Similarly, we learn of Marcher: "Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle" (508). Bridgenorth sheds tears when she sees the painting, a recognition in part of what is gone. Marcher's passion is lost in passivity; Bridgenorth's is lost through death. For both, passion has become memory.

In this parable of time, the narrator is the character who, in telling the story, creates his own artistic record of experience and is left at the end to confront the man who is the subject of the painting. In fact, it is ironic that he is memorialized at all. Mary tells the narrator: "He had known many women" (323). The best analogue for the man in James's short fiction at this time is "The Special Type." Frank Brivet, wanting a divorce, pretends to be having an affair with Alice Dundene, a woman of questionable reputation. Brivet hopes that this will make his reluctant wife agree to a divorce. It does, but not before Dundene, in her discreet way, falls in love with him. She requests a portrait of Brivet (ironically, one has already been painted for Mrs. Cavenham, Brivet's new love), bringing to mind the motives of Bridgenorth and Mary in what she tells the narrator-artist: "It will be him for me.... I shall live with it, keep it all to myself, and--do you know what it will do?--it will seem to make up" (304). When Mary, in "The Tone of Time," calls the man of the portrait "supremely beautiful--and supremely base" (310), she hints at a combination that ultimately betrays her, but also at a complexity that makes for art. The man may not be worthy of her, may not deserve her version of "the altar of the dead," but, unlike the realistic narrator, she prefers to live in illusion. Perhaps the narrator, for his part, senses what he has missed and what he has lost: "This is an old man's tale" (325). At the end, the narrator is left to recreate the story of others' passions and gaze at the elusive life that endures through Mary's creation.

For all its strengths, "The Tone of Time" has gotten a mixed response when it has not suffered neglect. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock see the story as much more allusive than the source that inspired it: "The subject ... was material for hardly more than an anecdote, but his additions made it capable of relatively serious treatment" (284). That treatment is still too formulaic for some. Bruce R. McElderry, Jr. reduces the story to a "revelation of rivalry" (122). In Stories oft he Supernatural, Edel emphasizes the story's lightness: "the note is one of comedy" (600). For some readers, this element of "The Tone of Time" may be a stumbling block. It should not be. Edward Wagenknecht acknowledges "the long arm of coincidence" in the story, but sees it finally as "a searching study of human character and motives" (206). Further, the work is more than a story from James's late period in which "protagonists opt for renunciation ... (they prefer `The Tone of Time')" (Tanner 125). In this story, the power of memory deceives, but it also sustains and redeems in the configuration of art. Haunting as any of James's late stories about the painful centrality of time in human lives, "The Tone of Time" deserves to take a more prominent place beside them.

(1) See A Small Boy and Others in Dupee (36):

   Was he not even at that time on all lips, had not my brother, promptly
   master of the subject, beckoned on my lagging mind with a recital of The
   Gold Bug and The Pit and the Pendulum?--both of which, however, I was soon
   enough to read for myself, adding to them The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
   Were we not also forever mounting on little platforms at our infant schools
   to "speak" The Raven and Lenore ...?--[;] he lay upon our tables and
   resounded in our mouths, while we communed to satiety, even for boyish
   appetites, over the thrill of his choicest pages.

WORKS CITED

Edel, Leon, ed. Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural. By Henry James. 1949. New York: Taplinger, 1970.

--. Henry James: The Treacherous Years 1895-1904. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969.

Donoghue, Denis, ed. Complete Stories 1898-1910. By Henry James. New York: Library of America, 1996.

Dupee, Frederick W., ed. Henry James: Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1913.

Hollander, John, and David Bromwich, eds. Complete Stories 1892-1898. By Henry James. New York: Library of America, 1996.

James, Henry. "The Beast in the Jungle." Donoghue ##-##.

--. "The Real Thing." Hollander and Bromwich ##-##.

--. "The Special Type." Donoghue ##-##.

--. "The Tone of Time." Donoghue ##-##.

Matthiessen, F. O., and Kenneth B. Murdock, eds. The Notebooks of Henry James. New York: Oxford UP, 1947.

McElderry, Bruce R., Jr. Henry James. New York: Twayne, 1965.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition. Ed. Stuart Levine and Susan Levine. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.

Tanner, Tony. Henry James: The Writer and His Work. 1985. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1989.

Wagenknecht, Edward. The Tales of Henry James. New York: Ungar, 1984.

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