This Day in Literary History (Henry James Returns to America, Shocked and Awed)

August 30, 1904—Catching his breath before his upcoming cross-country lecture tour, Henry James disembarked from the Kaiser Wilhelm II onto the Hoboken waterfront, blinking at an America that had changed astonishingly since the last time he had been back more than two decades before.

Except for brief visits in 1881 and 1883 for business reasons and deaths in the family, the 61-year-old novelist had not stopped foot in the United States since he went to England, to live freely and cheaply, in 1875. The sight of the Manhattan skyline now confronted him with the shock of the new, so much so, according to biographer Leon Edel, that he was “deaf to the questions of his friends.”

But that was nothing compared with the expatriate’s disorientation over the nation’s physical, commercial and demographic transformation, as well as séances that intrigued his brother and sister-in-law in Cambridge, Mass., the philosopher William James and his wife Alice. These cumulative experiences jolted James into writing one of his most significant nonfiction works, The American Scene, as well as a ghost story with uncharacteristic autobiographical overtones, “The Jolly Corner.”

In some quarters, critic Van Wyck Brooks has come in for abuse for suggesting that James did not necessarily emerge as a better artist by going abroad. They have a point in one sense: James would never have been so massively immersed in the art, culture and corruption of Europe that serves as the leitmotif of his work from this point on if he had stayed in New York or Boston.

On the other hand, I don’t see how anyone can deny that James missed out on perhaps the greatest subject of the late nineteenth century: the rise of a reunited United States to a world power. In addition, living in Europe limited his exposure to the vast array of emerging ethnic groups that were making the United States a more vital, if sometimes crude, force than the world had seen to date.

Maybe prolonged exposure to these groups might not have led James to soften the attitudes toward, for instance, Jews in The American Scene. But the example of another literary-minded representative of Old New York, Theodore Roosevelt, is instructive.

T.R. continued to believe to his dying day in the notion of Anglo supremacy that was propagated by Darwin’s The Descent of Man, but meeting members of other groups in the West, at San Juan Hill, and even in the New York state legislature forced him to work through his feelings of what it meant to be an American. For all his persistent return to the theme of American innocence and continental corruption, James never really arrived at this recognition.

The literal issue of his arrival was confusing enough. Rather than heading straight up to see his brother and sister-in-law, as planned, James was persuaded to come to the Jersey shore home of Colonel George Harvey, his publisher at Harper & Brothers, who had suggested this tour in the first place.

There the novelist met Mark Twain, also enjoying Harvey’s hospital. I don’t know about you, but I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at dinner that night—not just to hear Twain regale his host and guests with his hilarious conversation, but to get a load of one of his lifted eyebrows as he attempted to make sense of one of James’ convoluted sentences.

(By the way, is there an author less suited to Twitter than James, particularly in this rococo phase of his career? Forget putting an entire sentence of his on Twitter—he’d have been lucky to get halfway to his first semicolon!)

In Henry James: The Mature Master, Sheldon Novick points out that the author had regretted the lack of specificity about current American commerce in his portrait of tycoon Adam Verver in The Golden Bowl. James now became more familiar with the landscape the real-life Adam Ververs of the turn of the century had created. He wasn’t thrilled by what he saw.

At his childhood home, on Waverley Place, within sight of the Washington Arch that now dominated Greenwich Village, he felt only an intensification of the traits of antebellum New York that had not endeared it to him in the first place. As he recorded it in The American Scene:

With this melancholy monument it could make no terms at all, but turned its back to the strange sight as often as possible, helping itself thereby, moreover, to do a little of the pretending required, no doubt, by the fond theory that nothing hereabouts was changed. Nothing was, it could occasionally appear to me--there was no new note in the picture, not one, for instance, when I paused before a low house in a small row on the south side of Waverley Place and lived again into the queer mediaeval costume (preserved by the daguerreotypist's art) of the very little boy for whom the scene had once embodied the pangs and pleasures of a dame's small school. The dame must have been Irish, by her name, and the Irish tradition, only intensified and coarsened, seemed still to possess the place, the fact of survival, the sturdy sameness, of which arrested me, again and again, to fascination. The shabby red house, with its mere two storeys, its lowly "stoop," its dislocated ironwork of the forties, the early fifties, the record, in its face, of blistering summers and of the long stages of the loss of self-respect, made it as consummate a morsel of the old liquor-scented, heated-looking city, the city of no pavements, but of such a plenty of politics, as I could have desired.

Oh, that “plenty of politics.” The Irish might have been okay as servants for the James family, but the idea of an Irish-dominated Tammany Hall filled him with more horror than the ambiguous ghosts of The Turn of the Screw.

If anything, James recoiled even more from the “the Hebrew conquest of New York.” The writer might have had his problems with Catholics, but their churches with their magnificent art appealed to the aesthete in him.

On the other hand, Jews—in large and growing numbers, in such abject poverty that labor unions and socialism were increasingly bruited around—held no such advantage. Their physiognomy led James to indulge in the worst kind of pseudo-scientific racism, as he likened them to bottom fish "of overdeveloped proboscis" and compared their capacities to survive assimilation to that of worms who live despite being cut up into segments.

“There is no swarming like that of Israel where once Israel has got a start.” Thirty years later, Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher would have nodded approvingly at that awful sentiment.

You can find all of James’ alienation—and, in fact, the issue of identity and an alternative life that was later raised by Brooks—in his 1908 short story, “The Jolly Corner.” I prefer Edith Wharton’s ghost stories to James’, but this one is not without interest—particularly, as I’ve indicated, because of the autobiographical elements in the work.

Like James, the protagonist, Spencer Brydon, has forsaken America to live abroad, at least partly for reasons of aesthetic appreciation. Like his creator, he’s not enamoured of the changes he’s seen: “the ‘swagger’ things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay.”

Spencer’s back to look after two properties that have come into his hands following the death of two of his brothers—just as Henry had lost a brothers Wilkinson Garth (Wilkie) James, and his parents years before.

Henry had a sister who had also died, Alice. Not coincidentally, the short story splits her identity between Spencer’s deceased “favorite sister” and his sympathetic female friend, Alice. In a way, it parallels the doppelganger theme that serves as the climax of the story.

The “jolly corner” is the Washington Square building in which Spencer grew up and of which he has such fond memories. Already, however, James has introduced a small symbolic detail meant to undermine his mental stability: “the mere number in its long row, having within a twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had proved beautifully possible.” Psyches, like supposedly solidly built physical structures, are about to cave in.

And that’s what happens when Spencer makes the mistake of walking around his empty childhood home, thinking of the road not taken. Suddenly, he glimpses in the corner what he believes to be his alter ego: “Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there."

Spencer collapses from the shock, awakening to find himself in the arms of Alice. Like May Bartrum of his earlier novella, The Beast in the Jungle, she is there to attempt to save the aging protagonist from the “peculiar destiny” that he dreads yet inevitably is forced to confront.

This ghost story reflects how late middle age had brought James, just like older brother William, face to face with issues of mortality and existential dread. Their works dealt increasingly with the supernatural and what William called “the varieties of religious experience.”

William and his wife had attended Boston séances conducted by Leanora Piper. Mrs. positively believed—and William felt himself increasingly gripped by the possibility—that Piper might have the power to bring, from beyond the grave, communications from their son Herman. Henry was well aware of all of this, and was loath to dismiss it. The paranormal merely confirmed his increasing interest in the fractured self.

James did not make out badly at all on the trip—his literary lectures only allowed him to cover his expenses, and he came out with an incredible variety of compelling material. It’s too bad, however, that he did not come away with an expanded view of the country he left behind.

“The money passion” had lurked underneath the surface of most of his great works over the years. James had grown so skeptical of this force that he was utterly unable to see how it could figure positively in history.

All about his native country, James could only see a crassness bred by pursuit of the dollar, and came away even more convinced that America had little in the way of civilization to recommend it. A bit more historical perspective might have shown him that even the Europe he worshipped had evolved through the same often-ugly capitalist instincts.

New York had nothing on Venice as a city in which corruption and commerce were intertwined. Yet Venice had evolved into a force for aesthetic appreciation. James could not see that the same process was at work in New York, and that the same type of grasping mercantile captains who had made Venice possible would, within a few more decades, make New York a cultural as well as commercial capital of the world.