1894 The irony behind this contempt is that both men started out much the same. Both were born in New York City, sons of wealthy parents. Both attended Harvard, though James only briefly, while Roosevelt graduated with distinction. And as Philip Horne, editor of James’s letters, points out, both young men were affected by ill health, but ‘James came East to Europe for his cure, while Roosevelt worked out with weights and went West’.1
It is true that Roosevelt, like Francis Parkman, saw the West as a test of American manhood, and that he approved mightily of Owen Wister’s The Virginian (see 15 February, 11 June and 4 August). What is not so true – at least not in the sense that Roosevelt expressed it – is that James had somehow ceased to be American. First of all, technically, he had retained his American citizenship, and wouldn’t give it up until 1915, one year from his death, in protest at America’s refusal to join the war in Europe.
Secondly, though James was sufficiently defensive on the issue to insist that he could write an American novel (see 8 April), in a sense nearly all his novels were American – that is, about Americans in Europe, or (in rare cases, like The Europeans) Europeans in America. He was forever posing the question of what it was to be an American, by exploring the borders between American and European social behaviour and emotional responses.
And when James wanted to get inside the consciousness of his protagonists, it was more often than not the American characters he chose – from Christopher Newman in The American (1877), through Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl (1904).
1 Philip Horne, ‘Henry James and “the forces of violence”: on the track of “big game” in “The Jolly Corner”’, Henry James Review, 27 (2006), pp. 237–48, p. 1.