Sad Rags: Tales of Enchanted Dresses

In 1868 Henry James, then a youthful twenty-five, published a story called “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” presumably not imagining that this tale of enchanted garments would be prophetic. The story is apprentice work that has its melodramatic moments. A dying wife packs an attic trunk with clothes and jewelry and forbids access to any woman brazen enough to marry her soon-to-be-widowed husband. Her successor, consumed with curiosity, opens the trunk to uncanny effect:

The lid of the chest stood open, exposing, among their perfumed napkins, its treasure of stuffs and jewels. Viola had fallen backward from a kneeling posture, with one hand supporting her on the floor and the other pressed to her heart. On her limbs was the stiffness of death, and on her face, in the fading light of the sun, the terror of something more than death. Her lips were parted in entreaty, in dismay, in agony; and on her bloodless brow and cheeks there glowed the marks of ten hideous wounds from two vengeful ghostly hands.

Was the story indeed prophetic? Some years ago, amid the continuing flow of biographical studies of Henry James, another bizarre story about old clothes—“sad rags” as I call them—appeared. This one was said to be true. In a bbc interview in 1956, forty years after James’s death in 1916, an ancient English lady claimed to have heard the tale from James himself. Its setting was the suicide in Venice in 1894 of James’s friend and fellow novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. When he learned of her death, presuming that she had died of natural causes, James made ready to journey to Rome for her burial in the old Protestant cemetery, where many writers rest, including Shelley and Keats. He bought train tickets and braced for travel. But then press notices indicated that she had probably taken her own life. Distraught, James canceled his plans. He avoided Venice till months later, when he went there to help Fenimore’s sister, Clara Benedict, and her daughter clear Fenimore’s sealed apartment and sort her cluttered belongings—a sad and burdensome duty.

Now, getting to the heart of the matter, I quote from a colorful account of the sad rags story. It appears in Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life of Henry James (1998) and echoes Miss Gordon’s belief that James held himself in some degree responsible for Fenimore’s fatal leap from her apartment window.

In old age, Mercede Huntington recalled how James had let it out “in such an extraordinary sort of dribble” from the corner of his mouth, mumbling and funny. He told her he “had to do certain things” as though he were following instructions or carrying out a will. Young, entertained, she had listened as to a story: “there were lots of clothes—you see—and a lot of those black dresses, so he threw them in the water and they came up like balloons all around him and the more he tried to throw them down, the more they came up and he was surrounded by these horrible black balloons.” In 1956 . . . his listener, wandering at times, returned to this surreal scene: the black shapes on the Laguna, the man beating them down, and the wide sleeves filling, the full fronts riding on the surface . . . like willful phantoms he could not dispel. And the dribbling voice telling her this with persistent hilarity, so many years ago.

Miss Gordon is a respected literary critic and a former tutor in English at my Oxford college. I regret to say that her elaboration of this “surreal” Venetian scene seems to me remarkably credulous. Those who know a bit of the character of Henry James would doubt that he would rehearse so painful a memory to a young stranger on a social occasion, let alone in a mirthful or “dribbling” way. Why would James, or Miss Woolson’s nearest kin, have adopted so weird a means of disposing of old dresses, rather than donating them to friends or relatives or charity? Several boxes of her effects were...