I found Henry James in college and he told me who I was. 

My dad was just as much a bully as the father in Washington Square, a grim little masterpiece, and even though my Czech father didn’t look anything like Ralph Richardson in the 1949 film version of Washington Square, when it came to contempt, they were twins.  I felt as miserable under his scrutiny as Catherine in Washington Square.

But the James book that blew me wide open was The Portrait of a Lady.  If you haven’t read it or seen the Nicole Kidman film, it’s a classic Jamesian tale of American innocence seduced and betrayed by European sophistication.  Isabel Archer lives quietly in Upper New York State until she inherits a fortune and decides to go to Europe and find some cause or purpose she can devote her money to. Her project turns sour, however, because she marries a “sterile dilettante,” hypnotized by his impeccable taste and perfect manners.  He wants her money and doesn’t care about her feelings or goals in life.

I fell in love with the novel the instant I read the first page with its seductive opening line

“Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”  I’d never had anything but a Lipton teabag in a mug, but I was hooked by the rhythm, the voice, the sense of being confided in by someone charming and calm.  I read on as Portrait unfolded an English country house scene with a dog and a Lord and an invalid and a rich American retiree.  God, I wanted to be sitting there with them. The prose was luscious and every following scene was as real as my Washington Heights bedroom.  I read Portrait at every opportunity and one night was even up at 3 a.m. because I was so engrossed.

That’s the night when I hit the book’s famous Chapter 42 where Isabel is up late, staring into a fire reflecting on what her life has been like since marriage.  She expected that she and her husband would share love, culture, adventure and a passion for change, but she’s become a prisoner in her Roman palazzo.  And she has a very dark epiphany:

….she had seen where she really was. She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation.

I was the son of Holocaust survivors, and death and destruction haunted our house from as soon as I was aware of their past, which they tried to shelter me from, unsuccessfully.  My mother wanted to stay silent but sometimes horrible anecdotes of the suffering she’d seen or endured burst from her at the kitchen table.  I was flattened by the cruelty she revealed to me, and afraid.

But James’s description of Isabel made me determined.  As a queer Jew, I couldn’t be any less like her, and yet I lived in a house of darkness too, and I knew I would have to start writing about it somehow.  Writing about living with survivors, and writing about being gay. I loved short stories, and that seemed like the path.

Portrait seemed to read me as much as I read the book.  I even dreamed about James offering me avuncular, silent encouragement—in front of Carnegie Hall.  The marquee was blazing with light and we could have been onstage.  He was there in evening clothes and I asked him for advice, rhetorically: “That’s how you did it, you kept writing no matter what?” 

He nodded as if giving me a benediction.

I stopped working on fiction about the backbiting of the theater department I was a peripheral member of and wrote a story about two college dudes in a relationship.  I wasn’t in involved with a guy myself, so there was an element of fantasy, but my creative writing teacher at the time was impressed.  “I knew you could do it!  I knew you could write something real.“

Two years later, in my MFA program, I went further and wrote a story about the son of survivors, a story that won a prize and was published in a national magazine. Through all that time, I was ablaze and determined.  I was reading everything of James that I could find, and reading about him, too, but it is Portrait that has stayed with me the most over the years.  It’s the catalyst for a long career, the book I clearly needed to read right then.  Call it kismet, luck, coincidence.  I call it a gift.

– Lev Raphael

Note: This essay originally appeared in Fifth Wheel in 2022