Henry James Was Not at Home in America
Contra Thomas Wolfe, you actually can go home again—but once you see how much it’s changed, you may want to leave just as quickly. When Henry James, after spending most of his adult life abroad, returned in 1904 for a 10-month-long tour of the United States, he was dismayed to find that many of the old buildings and spaces he once cherished had been obliterated—such as his childhood homes in Boston and Manhattan’s Washington Square or the “dusky lecture halls” of Copley Square, where his father (a theosophy-leaning lover of Swedenborg) had once given talks, along with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Even worse: In their places had risen implacable monuments and skyscrapers that stood unassailable to James’s nightly flaneur-ish ramblings; they no longer reverberated with his fading memories of youth but only testified to America’s “power of the purse.”
The U.S. had become a largely unfamiliar country filled with strange new architectures and foreign voices. And while James had hoped to rediscover his homeland with freshly scrubbed perceptions (much as, when a young man, he first discovered his love for Italy, France, and London), he soon found himself just as “lost in America” as Albert Brooks would a century later. “The very sign of its energy,” he went on to write in his late, impressive, and often complexly difficult travel memoir, The American Scene, in 1907:
is that it doesn’t believe in itself: it fails to succeed, even at a cost of millions, in persuading you that it does. Its mission would appear to be, exactly, to gild the temporary, with its gold, as many inches thick as may be, and then, with a fresh shrug, a shrug of its splendid cynicism for its freshly detected inability to convince, give up its actual work, however exorbitant, as the merest of stop-gaps. The difficulty with the compromised charmer is just this constant inability to convince; to convince ever, I mean, that she is serious, serious about any form whatever, or about anything but that perpetual passionate pecuniary purpose which plays with all forms, which derides and devours them, though it may pile up the cost of them in order to rest a while, spent and haggard, in the illusion of their finality.
It’s the sort of convoluted passage that runs throughout The American Scene, often taking as much time for a reader to unravel as James spent raveling it. Basically, James argues that early twentieth-century America liked to “gild” things just long enough to fool observers into believing they were worth gilding; but as soon as this illusion fades away or wears off, America quickly moves on to purveying the next one.
Everywhere James looked, he saw money motivating people away from the cultural pleasures and beauties that he loved (theaters, libraries, and art galleries). It is hard to think of an American writer who was more disgusted with the dirty realities of capitalism, or one who worked so hard to make money doing the brighter, cleaner things he loved—composing books, stories, plays, and essays.
Henry James Comes Home arrives as a late companion piece to preeminent Jamesian scholar Peter Brooks’s earlier, similarly structured book, Henry James Goes to Paris (2007), which described James’s youthful engagements with Turgenev, Zola, Sand, and Flaubert—during which he learned, or saved away to adopt later in life, those “modern” fictional techniques that distinguished French novelists in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Along the way, Brooks examined how these techniques came to be used in James’s greatest novels, such as The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove. In these works, Brooks wrote, “James appears to reach back to lessons learned in Paris in the mid-1870s—to the lessons of Flaubert, but also more generally to what he picked up in the city that was inventing modernism. It’s as if what James rejected in 1875–76 had lain dormant in him ever since, only coming to flower at the fin de siècle.”
Brooks’s two “mini-biographies” of James, each covering only a few years in the writer’s long and productive life, seek to uncover the “international” qualities of a man who may be America’s first truly “international” writer. Brooks’s first book of criticism, The Novel of Worldliness: Crebillon, Marivaux, Laclos, Stendhal (1969), examined the ways literature developed from, and influenced, a cultural world that extended across nations and continents; and it significantly arrived at a time when many of the so-called “New Critics” (and later, Brooks’s Yale “deconstructionist” colleagues, such as De Man, Miller, and Derrida) usually focused on the microscopic, apolitical, and even ahistorical features of individual stories, novels, and poems. Against the tide of his contemporaries, Brooks has preferred to read across the lifetimes of individual authors and across the national boundaries that never constrained them. For Brooks, being part of a world much bigger than one’s own country is the essence of our best novelists.
Over the decades, whether Brooks rowed against the critical currents or those currents were belatedly catching up with him, he has remained one of the few literary critics who could write sentences and paragraphs with clarity, concision, and even beauty in them. His books, while energized with critical perspective and opinion, don’t wear readers down with a lot of academic jargon. And he is often as pleasurable to read as the artists he writes about.
Americans, notoriously, don’t travel well, but James enjoyed the dissonances of foreign manners and languages, and his American characters accepted more quickly the limitations of Europeans than they did those of one another. In his final long journey through America, from Manhattan to San Francisco and from Maine to Georgia, however, it’s not Americans who disappoint James so much as the environment they’ve fashioned for themselves. The wealthiest Americans, in fact, seem to him isolated from both art and society. In a letter to Edith Wharton, he describes Biltmore House, where he stayed several days with the Vanderbilts, as
a gigantic and elaborate … monument to all that isn’t socially possible there. It’s, in effect, like a gorgeous practical joke—but at one’s own expense, after all, if one has to live in solitude in these league-long marble halls, & sit in alternate Gothic and Palladian cathedrals, as it were—where now only the temperature stalks about—with the “regrets,” sighing along the wind, of those who have declined.… I feel that in speaking of it as I have, I don’t do justice to the house as a phenomenon (of brute achievement). But that truly wd. take me too far! It’s only as a place to live in, & in the conditions fatally imposed, that I, before it, threw up my hands—!
The problem with the grotesquely wealthy is similar to that of the impoverished—they are people who fail to mix with, move into, and maintain those common, well-mannered social spaces that preceded them. On the one hand, there was the Yiddish theater district, which made the New York streets “unspeakable” with their “bacchanal, so hugely hatted and feathered and flounced”; on the other, there were those “white elephants” James drives past in Newport, which he describes as “vast and blank, for reminder to those concerned of the prohibited degrees of witlessness, and of the peculiarly awkward vengeances of affronted proportion and discretion. These newly erected mansions and “unspeakable” urban altercations were commensurate examples of America’s “perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there had been a past to repudiate.” Conversely, what James loves about Europe is the beauties that outlasted, and “civilized,” the past’s violences and upheavals that produced them.
James grew up in a large, boisterously intelligent family. His father, Henry Sr., had lost his right leg to extraordinarily painful childhood surgeries (without anesthetic) and used the large inheritance from his father to read deeply in various disciplines, eventually favoring the great theosophist crackpot, Swedenborg. With his wife, he traveled the world seeking educational opportunities for his six precocious children and traveled with private tutors through London, Switzerland, Italy, and France. The six children were raucous with intelligence; Henry quickly learned to prefer Europe as a fulfillment of social life. One of the preeminent ghost story writers of the last two centuries, he saw apparitions everywhere: they floated through the lives of people who had been living in the same homes over generations until their spiritual histories were almost inextricable from the walls, rooms, and furnishings.
Having learned to prefer long-cultivated European spaces, James expresses a sincere concern for America’s Indigenous populations; after all, it is being Indigenous with a culture over many generations that, James feels, most enriches men and women. While exploring the Capitol in The American Scene, he encounters “a trio of Indian braves, braves dispossessed of forest and prairie, but as free of the builded labyrinth as they had ever been of these.” For James, they walk the “printless pavements of the state” as a sort of testimony to what those pavements have tried to cover up, and as
specimens, on show, of what the Government can do with people with whom it is supposed able to do nothing. They seemed just then and there, for a mind fed betimes on the Leatherstocking Tales, to project as in a flash an image in itself immense, but foreshortened and simplified—reducing to a single smooth stride the bloody footsteps of time.
This glimpse into the forgotten past seems unusual for a time when natives were mostly depicted as either irredeemably “savage” or “noble” and “vanishing.” Yet while James is rarely an astute political writer, his metaphoric visions in The American Scene, Brooks argues, are unusually perceptive, not only recognizing the “vanishing” of a race but also the “printless pavements of the state” used to disguise the fact that they didn’t go quietly, or without coercion.
As James writes early in The American Scene, “One’s supreme relation … was one’s relation to one’s country.” James didn’t journey to America simply to see what he had left behind; he went there to see what parts of himself he had left behind with it, and whether any of those broken pieces were worth recovering. The answer, it seems, was a very firm no.
Brooks is is unusually refreshing in his willingness to read so generously a writer from another century who doesn’t always live up to the way we read now. James’s observations can read like the mutterings of an insensitive middle-class man who doesn’t like seeing new neighbors move in down the block. Whether visiting Ellis Island and feeling a “chill in his heart” that the “‘sanctity of his American consciousness’… must be shared with ‘the inconceivable alien’” or wandering through crowds of strangers in the skyscraper-looming streets of Manhattan, James continually reflects on how America can no longer appreciate its own American-ness amid the continuous din of
the consummate monotonous commonness, of the pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass—with the confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights. It appeared, the muddy medium, all one with every other element and note as well, all the signs of the heaped industrial battle-field, all the sounds and silences, grim, pushing, trudging silences too, of the universal will to move—to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any price.
Snobbery, obviously; but as Brooks argues, not so much racist or nationalistic as disappointed in the chaotic flowing of strangers and laborers marching to the beat of commerce and nothing else.
In “The Jolly Corner,” James’s final short story and his last completed fictional effort to describe the psycho-emotional journey from America to Europe and back again, his central protagonist, Spencer Brydon, returns to New York City after several decades abroad to catch up with two of his old properties, which are situated on opposing corners of a downtown intersection—one corner is filled with quite “jolly” memories of childhood, while the other is darkly implicated in a financial world that has been providing Brydon the money he needed to leave that world behind. He hates being back in New York and can only make his days purposeful in ways that most James characters do—by relentless observation. So he sets out: “to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.”
Brydon’s expedition into his former American properties leads him to discover, or intuit, the ghost of the man he might have been had he never escaped to Europe—an alternate self that has been transformed into an “awful beast” with a mutilated hand and a “rage of personality” powerful enough to sustain him in the jungle of American commerce. In other words, the sort of man who could no longer appreciate Europe’s rich, alternative possibilities, and who lived only for his “million a year.”
While James’s trip was made partly to visit his living relatives and friends—especially his brother William and his family—and visit the “unspeakable group of graves” that held the remains of his father, mother, and tragic sister, Alice (in her brief life, she suffered from so many mysterious mental and physical ailments that she inspired brother William to go into psychotherapy), James built his U.S. itinerary around a book contract, and took every advantage to profit from his reputation as one of America’s most “serious” literary figures. He arranged lectures and newspaper interviews to help pay his way; often stayed over with famous and wealthy friends, such as Henry Adams and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; and once dined at an illustriously guested table with Teddy and Edith Roosevelt. In many ways, James’s tour was one of the first examples of a writer making the most of every opportunity to be “lionized,” and it’s possible to argue that nobody has done it better—before or since.
The result is a travel memoir that records the delight and consternation of a writer revisiting a country he both couldn’t leave behind and couldn’t abide as a permanent home. And the conclusions he eventually reached were so dark that they caused his American publishers to leave them out (along with the entire final chapter), even though they had been included in the British edition only one week previously. James’s thoughts in that final chapter are as angry and denunciatory as just about anything written by a popular American novelist:
You touch the great lonely land—as one feels it still to be—only to plant upon it some ugliness about which, never dreaming of the grace of apology or contrition, you then proceed to brag with a cynicism all your own. You convert the large and noble sanities that I see around me, you convert them one after another to crudities, to invalidities, hideous and unashamed; and you so leave them to add to the number of the myriad aspects you simply spoil, of the myriad unanswerable questions that you scatter about as some monstrous unnatural mother might leave a family of unfathered infants on doorsteps or in waiting-rooms.
He then accuses America of offering a “pretended message of civilization” which, at its mercenary heart, “is but a colossal recipe for the creation of arrears.” This vision of an America that deploys ideals of “freedom” in order to force “arrears” on anybody dumb enough to buy them—like a con man selling a game nobody but the con man can win—sounds much like the America we endure today.
Had James lived long enough to describe his westward journeys through California and the Pacific Northwest in a planned second volume, The Sense of the West, he might have brought a softer conclusion to his American sojourn. But he chose to skip those already-recorded adventures in order to bring emphasis to his dark conclusions, so maybe he knew (as he usually did) what he was doing. After all, when James returned, a few weeks later, to his beloved Lamb House in Sussex, his frequent dinner companions, and his dogs, he was performing his final, genuine act of “coming home.” For it was in Sussex—and not America—where his heart, at the end, truly lay.