Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Leland S. Person

between men, Rowland provides the “voice of taste and authority,” while Roderick offers an “indefinable attraction—the something tender and divine of unspotted, exuberant, confident youth” (1: 30). In fact, Hudson seems to require of Mallet what Mallet requires of “something or someone”—a goad to self-expression, a form for self-expression and self-expenditure to take. Whereas Mallet hoards his energy, however, Hudson expends energy like Walt Whitman in bursts of exaggerated utterance, as when he announces his intention to become “the typical, original, aboriginal American artist” (1: 33). Furthermore, while Mary Garland confidently announces that sculpture is “Work for men” (1: 346), given the “row” with his mother that follows Roderick’s decision to accompany Rowland to Rome, James appears to be signaling the emergence of a male figure at odds with women—an artist empowered homoerotically and phallocentrically in the masculine by another male. Roderick wants to “strike out hard” and “do something violent and indecent and impossible—to let off steam” (1: 71)—but he rejects conventional masculinity and conventional masculine models.⁷ He commits himself to high art, becoming an “aesthete gloriosus” in Richard Ellman’s felicitous term (214). Roderick is an artist to “his fingers’ ends,” James observes (1: 29), and during his apprenticeship he has used his sculptural “fingertips” to form male rather than female figures. Disengaging Roderick from women (despite his engagement to Mary), James explores the possibility of a homo-aesthetic creativity—empowered by the investment of male subjectivity (and Rowland’s speculative desire) and focused on male subjects. In volunteering himself to be Roderick’s patron, Rowland ensures that he will possess and become the privileged viewer of Roderick’s productions. Investing his own desires in Roderick’s art, he enables male desire to circulate through sculpted objects to the male subjects triangulated with them—a “speculation” indeed—and thus to configure homoerotic desire reflexively.

      Roderick’s first sculpture, a bronze statuette called Thirst, represents a “youth of ancient fable—Hylas or Narcissus, Paris or Endymion”—whose beauty is the “beauty of natural movement” (1:17). Robert Martin, noting the mention of Hylas (beloved of Hercules), argues that the sculpture’s function is to “make the reader aware of a homosexual (or homoerotic) relationship between the two men” (“‘High Felicity’” 103).⁸ Mallet immediately takes Thirst into his possession—as if simultaneously introjecting homo-aesthetic desire and slaking his own “thirst” for Roderick by incorporating, or swallowing, an object Roderick has created. The four mythological figures to which James compares the statue, moreover, all represent an ephebic ideal that he would have known both from experience and from his reading.⁹ James knew that body type, and his use of it early in the novel emphasizes Roderick’s position as both a male subject and object: creator of desirable male bodies through his sculpture, object in his own right of Rowland Mallet’s attention and desire.

      James would have found in Walter Pater’s account of German art historian Johann Wincklemann’s interest in Greek sculpture authorization for admiring beautiful male bodies and seeking intimate male friendships—a model for the homo-aesthetic friendship of critic and sculptor he represented in Roderick Hudson and belatedly discovered when he met Hendrik Andersen. That Wincklemann’s “affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it,” Pater avows, “is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young men more beautiful than Guido’s archangel. These friendships, bringing him into contact with the pride of the human form, perfected his reconciliation to the spirit of Greek sculpture” (191).¹⁰ Roderick’s sculptural relationship with Rowland uncannily anticipates James’s relationship with Andersen, the American-born sculptor he met in Rome in May 1899. “The moment James climbed the stairs into Andersen’s sun-filled Roman studio,” observes Fred Kaplan, “he began a memorable relationship that was to clutch at his heart for the next five years” (447). As if replicating the behavior of his own protagonist, James immediately became Andersen’s patron; he insisted upon purchasing Andersen’s portrait bust of a young boy, Count Alberto Bevilacqua, which looked much like Andersen himself (Kaplan 447).¹¹ In his letters James pointedly used Andersen’s sculptures to mediate his own desire for the sculptor himself. Before closing his 9 May 1906 letter with the tender “goodnight, dearest Hendrik. I draw you close and hold you long and am ever tenderly yours” (Henry James Amato Ragazzo 160), James offers Andersen extended advice about sculpting nudity:

      I should go down on my knees to you, for instance, to individualize and detail the faces, the types ever so much more—to study, ardently, the question of doing that—the whole face-question. I should cheekily warn you against a tendency to neglect elegance—to emphasize too much the thickness and stoutness of limb, at the risk of making certain legs, especially from the knee down, seem too short etc.—and arms also too “stocky” and stony. The faces too blank and stony—the hair, for me, always too merely symbolic—and not living and felt. These offensive things I should say to you—in such a fashion that you would but love me better and our friendship would be but the tenderer and closer. (158–60)

      In this remarkable passage James overtly negotiates an ardent verbal relationship with Andersen through his sculptural criticism. Down on his knees before the sculptor, James examines the sculpted bodies and encourages Andersen to forego the symbolic register for the fully and individually embodied. James designs this “offensive” advice, moreover, to have a similar—more “living and felf” effect on his own relationship with Andersen.

      In his ability to sculpt an ideal male nude Roderick proves more successful than Hendrik Andersen, whom James would criticize for his inability to differentiate his nude figures by gender in terms uncannily similar to those used by one critic of Roderick Hudson. “I sometimes find your sexes (putting the indispensable sign apart!) not quite intensely enough differentiated—I mean through the ladies resembling a shade too much the gentlemen.” Divesting the penis of its phallocentric signifying power, James expands the coverage of his critical gaze to encompass other body parts. Citing the figure of a ballerina, James criticizes Andersen’s failure to allow her “sufficient luxury” of hip, “or, to speak plainly, Bottom.” “She hasn’t much more of that than her husband, and I should like her to have a good deal more” (162). Focusing though he does on a female figure and her “Bottom,” James closes his letter by expressing his desire to “take” Andersen to his “heart” and to “feel” his arms around him—making it clear that here too he uses sculptural criticism to express his desire for Andersen himself. James had established a similarly mediated relationship between Roderick Hudson and Rowland Mallet, but that relationship founders when Roderick turns from sculpting male to sculpting female figures.