Henry James’s American Journey

In February 1905 at around 10 o’clock at night, Henry James arrived in Palm Beach. He’d had a long trip — “the railway run from Jacksonville to Palm Beach begins early and ends late,” he writes in The American Scene, his account of the 10-month trip he took to the United States after 20 or so years spent abroad — and much of that trip had been spent dreaming of a meal at the Breakers, the famous luxury hotel to which he was headed. But when James got there, the kitchen was closed. No exceptions would be made; “the belated traveller’s appetite for the long-deferred ‘bite’” was denied. “Had it not been for the charity of admirable friends,” James writes, “I should have had to go, amid all the suggestions of everything, fasting and faint to bed.”

There’s something comic about the whole incident, starting with the sheer incongruity of James in Palm Beach. (Picture the Master, at this point in his life portly and frequently constipated, lounging on the white sand in a bathing costume, sipping a mojito.) But James, as was his wont, made much of this seemingly trivial event. For “the restless analyst,” as he calls himself, minor things “became positively richer objects under the smutch of imputation,” and the travel recorded in The American Scene — to New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, and elsewhere — was really a matter “of what one read into anything, not of what one read out of it.” And so, being denied a meal leads James to consider why a place of luxury would so fail to provide what is wanted and what that failure means:

For James, American hotels exist not to fulfill guests’ desires but to discipline, even determine those desires. Places like the Breakers or the Waldorf-Astoria, where James also stayed on his trip, might suggest illicit adventure — secret trysts! backroom deals! — but they actually produce a standardized, lifeless version of luxury. You can have a good meal but only if you show up at the right time; you can delight in “a high refinement of service” but only if you are refined enough — which is to say, boringly, suitably decent enough — to know what kind of service you should want. (American hotels ask only two things of you, he writes: first, that you have money; second, that you “be presumably ‘respectable,’ be, that is, not discoverably otherwise.”)

For James, the Breakers is the perfect distillation of what he calls elsewhere in The American Scene the “hotel-spirit” or “hotel-civilization”: a typically American realm of existence defined by “the rigour with which any appearance of pursued or desired adventure is kept down.” In his excellent new book, Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age, the eminent literary critic Peter Brooks summarizes James on the leveling effects of hotel-spirit: “The promise of America, for those who have made the money to indulge in what has been defined for them as ‘pleasure,’ seems to have resulted in a stultifying sameness. The restless analyst detects that the price of hotel-civilization is submission to the tyranny of what management has decided you shall want.” James thought hotel-civilization produced “a stultifying sameness.” Imagine what he’d make of algorithm-civilization.

In Henry James Comes Home, Brooks has two main goals: first, “to re-create James’s American journey” of 1904-5; second, to “say something about that experience,” analyzing “what James made of what his native land was in the way of becoming.” This blend of biography and criticism is appropriate given that The American Scene shuttles between these modes on every page. “History is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of what ‘happens,’” James writes, “but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection into it.” For James, biography is criticism (we don’t report a life but read it) and criticism is biography (we read filtered through our own experiences and subjectivity).

Brooks’s new book forms a diptych with his 2007 Henry James Goes to Paris. There, he argued that James’s experience in Paris in 1875-76 — hanging with Flaubert and Zola, seeing firsthand the experimentation of Impressionist painting — bore fruit in the “perspectival dramas” of his final three novels: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Here, Brooks argues that The American Scene is “one of the most penetrating sociological analyses ever written about the United States” and a classic expression of James’s late style.

By the time of his return to America, James was 61. He hadn’t stepped foot on his native soil in almost a quarter of a century, during which time the United States had grown in every way imaginable. All that James valued most highly in his fiction — “The manners, the manners: where and what are they, and what have they to tell?” as he puts it — seemed lacking in his home country. He wanted to take stock of “the great adventure of a society reaching out into the apparent void for the amenities, the consummations, after having earnestly gathered in so many of the preparations and necessities.” James was interested to see what he’d find in a country seeking to shape immense power into some coherent social form. And, as he observes in The American Scene, one finds a thing “interesting above all from the moment one desire[s] with any intensity to find it so.”

The subtitle of Brooks’s book — Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age — suggests that he wants to read contemporary relevance into James’s strange travelogue, using James’s analysis of his gilded age to allow us to see our own gilded age anew. It’s an interesting project. We don’t typically go to late James for thoughts on history or political economy: Famously, when asked what is manufactured in Woollett, Mass., Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors hems and haws — it’s “a small, trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use” — but won’t actually identify the “article produced.”

The American Scene is late James at its late Jamesiest. To use one of James’s favorite phrases, the book continually hangs fire. Its syntax withholds and withholds until (often, though not always) landing perfectly; its figurative comparisons are downright metaphysical in their inventiveness and elaboration. In one paragraph, Baltimore takes “the form of the silver cup filled with the mildest, sweetest decoction” before it “exhale[s] on the spot, as the word goes, an atmosphere” before it dons “to contemplation, in fine, a character as marked with mild accents as some faded old uniform is marked with tarnished buttons and braid — albeit these sources of interest were too closely of the texture to be snipped off, in the guise of patterns or relics, by any mere sharp shears of journalism.”

After reading The American Scene, William James, never hesitant to criticize his brother’s tendency towards stylistic convolution, wrote, “In this crowded and hurried reading age, pages that require such close attention remain unread & neglected. You can’t skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy readers grow intolerant. The method seems perverse: ‘Say it out, for God’s sake,’ they cry, ‘and have done with it.’” All of which is to say, The American Scene is mannered even by James’s standards.

Yet Brooks makes the convincing case that James’s analysis of his own time might illuminate our own. In many ways, 1905 rhymes with 2025. Then and now, as James puts it, “the preliminary American postulate or basis for any successful accommodation of life … is that of active pecuniary gain and of active pecuniary gain only.” Then and now, to walk through Manhattan is to experience “the constant shocked sense of houses and rows, of recent expensive construction (that had cost thought as well as money, that had taken birth presumably as a serious demonstration, and that were thereby just beginning to live into history) marked for removal, for extinction, in their primes.” Then and now, “One hears of the University idea threatened in more than one of the great institutions — reduced to some pettifogging conception of a short brisk term and a simplified culture; a lively thrifty training for ‘business-competition.’” Then and now, to travel on public transportation is “to yield to the invasion of a dozen or so of bareheaded and vociferous young women in the company of young men to match,” men and women who seem to imagine “the crowded contemplative cars, quite as familiar, domestic, intimate ground, set apart, it might be, for the discussion and regulation of their little interests and affairs, and for that so oddly, so innocently immodest ventilation of their puerile privacies at which the moralizing visitor so frequently gasps.”

Perhaps most strikingly, to live in 1905 or 2025 is to see immigration changing the face — and, crucially for James, the language — of America. As Brooks notes, “It is estimated that by 1910, recently arrived immigrants made up more than 40 percent of New York’s population.” Wandering lost through the New Hampshire countryside, James encounters a young man with “a dark-eyed ‘Latin’ look.” Assuming the man to be French-Canadian, he asks for directions in French, only to be surprised by the answer: “‘I’m an Armenian,’ he replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a wage-earning youth in the heart of New England to be.”

If you know anything about The American Scene, you probably know this: The fact of immigration calls forth some of James’s most loathsome writing. On the Lower East Side, James observes “the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds,” going on to imagine that he is “at the bottom of some vast sallow aquarium in which innumerable fish, of over-developed proboscis, were to bump together, for ever, amid heaped spoils of the sea.” But, as Brooks notes, immigration also calls forth some of his most enlightened thinking. “Who and what is an alien, when it comes to that,” James asks, “in a country peopled from the first under the jealous eye of history? — peopled, that is, by migrations at once extremely recent, perfectly traceable and urgently required.” Brooks notes the complexity of possession and dispossession in James’s analysis of America:

The American Scene ends with James imagining a “beautiful red man with a tomahawk” testifying to the harm that Americans have done to the land they violently came to possess: “Is the germ of anything finely human, of anything agreeably or successfully social, supposably planted in conditions of such endless stretching and such boundless spreading as shall appear finally to minister but to the triumph of the superficial and the apotheosis of the raw?” As Brooks notes, this “fierce indictment of what the country has done to itself” only appeared in the English edition. American publishers cut the imagined speech entirely.

It’s uninteresting and unjust to judge James by contemporary social and political norms, and Brooks doesn’t really do this. He reads into James’s book, yes. But, as James himself knew, that’s what critics and artists and just plain people do all the time. The question is how interesting you can make your readings. Perspectivalism is the formal and thematic heart of James’s late fiction, and it’s the formal and thematic heart of The American Scene, too. When James visits Boston, he can’t help but lament that “‘my’ defunct and compact and expressive little Boston appear[s] to don all the signs of that character that the New Land, and what is built thereon, miss.” Is this nostalgia? Sure. But it’s also the subjective position from which James makes Beacon Street and the State House shimmer with meaning. “How could one consider the place at all unless in a light,” James asks, “so that one had to decide definitely on one’s light.”