INTRODUCTION: A LITTLE TOUR WITH HENRY JAMES
Michael Anesko
MOST PEOPLE WHO KNOW SOMETHING OF HENRY JAMES might also know that, shortly before his death in 1916, he succumbed to a series of debilitating strokes. In their wake, for weeks he drifted in and out of consciousness, but often still capable of speech. While his faithful amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, remained with him, she dutifully recorded the words he spoke—as she had for years, seated at a Remington typewriter while he dictated the texts of his late fiction and much of his voluminous correspondence. In the latter of these fragmentary transcripts from his subconscious, Henry James transported himself back to France—even assuming the name of Napoléone—and declared his ambition to renovate certain apartments of the Louvre and the Tuileries, a grand project that would possess “a majesty unsurpassed by any work of the kind yet undertaken” in the First Empire.a In the strange meandering of his stricken brain, Henry James was completing a lifetime circuit of travel, for his very earliest memoryb was of sitting in a carriage—at two years of age—waggling his small feet under a flowing robe and taking in “the admirable aspect of the Place and the Colonne Vendôme,”c a monument erected in 1810 to commemorate Napoleon Bonaparte’s crushing victories at Austerlitz and Jena. Paris, of course, would provide the setting for some of the Master’s finest work—The Ambassadors (1903), perhaps most notably—but, almost from the beginning, his long shelf of stories and novels mapped out a crisscrossing itinerary of transatlantic scope, often in tandem with his own peripatetic adventures.
Not long after James’s birth in a house off Washington Square in New York City, his restless father (and namesake) took the family abroad for two years, first to Paris and then to London. The Jameses then spent the next ten years back in the United States, sometimes in Albany—where the paternal grandfather had made a vast fortune—but mostly on the island of Manhattan, whose bustling streets, theaters, and museums afforded the growing boy a prime urban spectacle. Ever wary of our native fixation on business and moneymaking, the elder Henry James still wanted to give his children (as he told Ralph Waldo Emerson) “a better sensuous education” than they were likely to receive in America,d and so he packed the family off again to Europe and distributed his brood, at various times, among schools in Geneva, London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Bonn or hired tutors to proctor them at home as they moved from place to place. Suckled thus in cosmopolitanism, young Henry James was never weaned.
At the age of twenty-six, Henry James Jr. (as he was then known) had already begun a literary career by writing short fiction and noticing current books for periodicals such as the North American Review, The Atlantic, and The Nation. At this point, he made his first solo trip abroad, deliberately choosing to follow an itinerary of his own making. His parents and older brother, William, had wanted him to absorb the rigors of German philosophy (and the tortuosities of the German language), but instead, after spending several months in England, France, and Switzerland, young Henry James crossed the Alps on foot and descended into Italy—a country and a culture still foreign to him, as his parents had never ventured there on any of the family’s previous European forays. Voluminous letters back to Cambridge chart the progress of his travels—as well as his burgeoning enthusiasm. Upon reaching the Eternal City, he gushed, “At last—for the first time—I live! It beats everything: it leaves the Rome of your fancy—your education—nowhere. It makes Venice—Florence—Oxford—London—seem like little cities of pasteboard. I went reeling and moaning thro’ the streets, in a fever of enjoyment.”e With time, those other places easily regained their luster in the young writer’s estimation, and the consecrated experience of them reaffirmed what would become the touchstones of travel for James: close observation, judicious measure, and comparison.
In 1872, James again had occasion to travel abroad, this time as a male guide and chaperone for his younger sister Alice (1848–1892) and their maternal “Aunt Kate” (Catharine Walsh, 1812–1889). After accompanying the women that summer to what was by then an almost familiar series of destinations in England, France, Switzerland, and Italy, James followed them to Liverpool in October to get them aboard a steamer heading back to America. But now he was determined to stay on and prove to himself (and his overstretched parents!) that he could support himself by his pen and not rely on banker’s drafts from Cambridge to pay for his sojourn. Most of the pieces reprinted in this volume provide fruitful testimony to that ambition as well as confirmation that he could. A quick census of his serial publications from 1872 through 1874 yields a fulsome tally: in those three years he published no fewer than eight short stories, seven notices of art installations or gallery exhibitions, twenty-eight book or theater reviews, and thirty travel sketches. Hardly an idle traveler, Henry James worked at his desk almost everywhere he went.
In many of these travel pieces we can catch humorous glimpses of details and elements that would find their way into James’s later works of fiction. In Saratoga, for example, the writer is forever being reminded that the superlative seems to be the natural degree of American idiom. “The piazza of the Union Hotel, I have been repeatedly informed, is the largest ‘in the world.’” His own broader experience obliges James to qualify such claims by gentle comparison: “There are a number of objects in Saratoga, by the way, which in their respective kinds are the finest in the world. One of these is Mr. John Morrissey’s casino. I bowed my head submissively to this statement, but privately I thought of the blue Mediterranean, and the little white promontory of Monaco, and the silver-gray verdure of olives, and the view across the outer sea toward the bosky cliffs of Italy.”
In Daisy Miller we hear such national braggadocio coming even from the mouths of babes: despite the loss of most of his baby teeth to dental caries, young Randolph Miller still insists that “American candy’s the best candy,” preferring it to lumps of sugar from the table d’hôte of the Trois Couronnes at Vevey.f In The Portrait of a Lady, the irrepressible New York journalist Henrietta Stackpole finds nothing in Europe that can stack up against American counterexamples: neither London nor Paris nor Rome can match “the luxury of our western cities,” she proudly boasts; even the majestic dome of St. Peter’s suffers “by comparison with that of the Capitol at Washington.”g How could Michelangelo hold a candle to Thomas U. Walter?
Subscribers to the Nation also might have appreciated the author’s subtle inside joking, when in 1870 he echoed a phrase first coined in the pages of the journal not long before. Strolling along the main avenue of Burlington, Vermont, James is favorably impressed by “the pleasant, solid American homes, with their blooming breadth of garden, sacred with peace and summer and twilight.” One of them in particular strikes his fancy, but he coyly defers ampler description of its domestic charm: “I reserve it for its proper immortality in the first chapter of the great American novel.” We must credit another Nation writer, John W. De Forest, with that legendary formulation; his brief essay, “The Great American Novel,” appeared in one of the earliest issues of 1868.h
But James redeemed this playful promise by using just such a setting in the first chapter of his (would-be) “great American novel,” Roderick Hudson (1875), which opens with a modest widow “doing the honors of an odorous cottage on a midsummer evening,” entertaining a visitor on “the rose-framed porch” of her comfortable home in Northampton, Massachusetts.i When, again in “Newport,” James “can almost imagine . . . a transient observer of the Newport spectacle dreaming momentarily of a great American novel, in which the heroine shall be infinitely realistic, and yet neither a schoolmistress nor an outcast,” he might even be anticipating the type of female protagonist that would become the consistent hallmark of his most enduring early work: Daisy Miller, in that eponymous novella, Catherine Sloper of Washington Square (1880), and Isabel Archer of The Portrait of a Lady (1881).
To be sure, an intelligent appreciation of travel encouraged Henry James to put a high premium on the virtues of literary realism. It is worth mentioning that his other notable contemporaries, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, also spent formative years in Europe at the earliest stages of their respective careers—an experience that keenly sharpened their awareness of distinctive cultural traits, manners, and habits of speech and helped them to dispel the kinds of romanticized impressions to which “innocents abroad” especially were prone.
Likewise wary of that tendency, James famously acknowledged (in an 1872 letter), “It’s a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.”j The experience of travel was, perhaps, the best safeguard. As James concluded in “Homburg Reformed” (1873), “The observations of the ‘cultivated American’ bear chiefly, I think, upon the great topic of national idiosyncrasies. He is apt to have a keener sense of them than Europeans; it matters more to his imagination that his neighbor is English, French, or German. He often seems to me to be a creature wandering aloof, but half naturalized himself. His neighbors are outlined, defined, imprisoned, if you will, by their respective national moulds, pleasing or otherwise; but his own type has not hardened yet into the Old-World bronze.”
In his travel writing collected here, as elsewhere, the touchstone for Henry James is freedom.
a Henry James, “The Deathbed Dictation,” in Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974–1984), 4:811.
b Disclosed in the first of his autobiographical volumes, Henry James, A Small Boy and Others, ed. Peter Collister (1913; rpt. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011).
c James, A Small Boy and Others, 46.
d Henry James Sr. to Ralph Waldo Emerson, August 31, 1849, in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935) 1:59.
e Henry James to William James, October 30, [1869], Edel, Henry James Letters, 1:160.
f Henry James, “Daisy Miller: A Study,” in Complete Stories, 1874–1884 (New York: Library of America, 1999), 240.
g Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, in Novels, 1881–1886 (New York: Library of America, 1985), 413, 493.
h John W. De Forest, “The Great American Novel,” Nation 6 (January 9, 1868): 27–29.
i Henry James, Roderick Hudson, in Novels, 1871–1880 (New York: Library of America, 1983), 168.
j Henry James to Charles Eliot Norton, February 4, 1872, in Edel, Henry James Letters, 1:274.