In a book-length study of the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne published in 1879, Henry James quoted his admired predecessor bemoaning the difficulty of writing a “romance”—that is, a novel—set in America, his “dear native land,” since it has “no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight.” Other American writers of the time would likely have raised a strong objection to Hawthorne’s deprecation of the country of his birth. James, however, saw his chance to take a potshot of his own and, employing a blunderbuss in place of Hawthorne’s derringer, delivered his list of “the items of high civilization” that he held to be essential for the working artist and that, so he considered, the America of his day was signally lacking:
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot!
Having fired off this tremendous salvo, James sought to soothe the wounds it was bound to inflict by adopting that elephantine levity of tone he used when he knew he was going too far and was in danger of receiving a hail of buckshot in return. “The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out,” he continued, “might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous”; though much may be lacking in the still-youthful United States, “a good deal remains.” However, all that he adduces of this “good deal” is his fellow countrymen’s “national gift, that ‘American humour’ of which of late years we have heard so much.” Besides, he added, laying down his firearm, it was “the American life of forty years ago” that Hawthorne was deploring.
From early on there were for James a number of reasons to quit his and Hawthorne’s “dear native land.” Not the least of the goads that drove him into exile—a happy exile, it should be said—was the abiding and often noisy presence of his loving but rivalrous older brother, the philosopher William James.
Their father, the eccentric spendthrift Henry James Sr., had lavished much of his inherited wealth on extended jaunts to Europe for himself, his wife, his four sons, and his daughter, Alice. Europe did not “take” with William. He was as much a true-blue Yankee as he was a New England Brahmin, and he was content to be the “American” that Henry in his later years piously but unconvincingly averred he would be, too, were he to live his life over. The fact is that Henry’s was as much a European sensibility as a non-European could cultivate. In 1875, at the age of thirty-two, he settled in Europe, first in Paris, briefly, and then London, where he lived for much of his life until he moved to Lamb House in Rye, near the coast of East Sussex. He was home twice in 1882, and melancholy trips they must have been: the first one in January when his mother died and the second in December when he heard that his father was approaching death. He returned again in 1910 for a last visit with William, who was terminally ill.
However, his most significant return home—or should that be “home”?—lasted ten months, beginning in 1904, when he traveled widely from coast to coast and north to south, in an act of rediscovery and recovery that resulted in The American Scene (1907). This is a travel book in form, for James records, diligently, vividly, and often beautifully, the sights, customs, and general disposition of the vast land through which he journeyed. But if a traveler of the day were to have taken it along as reading matter on the voyage to America, surely he or she, immediately upon disembarkation, would have hurried to the ticket office and booked a return passage on the next sailing.
The “new” America that James encounters, as he roams over it at the dawn of the American Century, leaves him little less than horrified. He had unwittingly prophesied his reaction in The Golden Bowl (1904), which he completed while he was making his arrangements for the trip. Toward the end of that novel, he has his ever astute observer Fanny Assingham shudderingly declare, “I see the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country, State after State—which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible.”
He undertook the arduous adventure ostensibly for commercial reasons: from the outset it was to be, in plain terms—though with James what terms are ever plain?—a lecture tour, an elevated form of hackwork from which a number of European writers, notably Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, had profited handsomely. Numerous invitations to undertake such a tour, backed by pledges of relatively clean lucre, had been made to James over the course of his career, but always he had refused. “I am sixty years old,” he wrote in reply to one inquiry, “and I have never written a lecture in my life.”
Now he began to reconsider. Publishers and magazine editors heard that he was planning an extended visit to the United States and rubbed their hands. McClure’s, a deep-pocketed monthly, invited him to write about the trip, and Harper and Brothers offered to serialize his impressions in the North American Review and to bring them out subsequently as a book.
An editor at Harper began to look into lecture opportunities across the country, and as his biographer Leon Edel drily observed, “James became interested from the moment he learned he could command substantial fees.” Airy estimates suggested he would earn as much as $500 for a talk, but his friend and fellow novelist William Dean Howells spoke more modestly of $200 or $150, which was still not unserious money for the time, and the task. And at least one venue in Indianapolis, James reported, “offers £100 [$500] for 50 minutes!” In the end he worked up a recyclable lecture, “The Lesson of Balzac”; it was “a long and dense affair,” Peter Brooks writes in his excellent critical study Henry James Comes Home, adding that “we have to wonder why [James] thought Americans wanted or needed that particular lesson.”
He administered “that particular lesson” in dozens of venues, from New York to Los Angeles, from South Bend to Seattle. The responses from his audiences were mixed. At the Contemporary Club in Philadelphia, he reported to William and his wife, Alice, his performance was “a complete success.” On other occasions he was less than a smash hit, depending on the gender of his audience. Brooks writes:
He lectured on March 11 to the Friday and Fortnightly Clubs. As reported in the next day’s Chicago Tribune—under the title “Enjoy James and Tea”—when he was done there remained only two men in the hall. One had gone to sleep and the other was penned in, along with three hundred women “who were greatly interested from first to last.”
Brooks delivers a severe rebuke to the Tribune’s reporter, whose “tone is condescending, philistine, sexist,” yet the little sketch does catch the faint touch of absurdity that often attended James’s ventures into the public sphere. James himself was alive to the occasionally comic aspect of his rotund orotundities. Writing to a New York hostess about the Philadelphia lecture he had boasted of to William and Alice, he presents himself as Célimare, a character in a French farce:
His affair at Philadelphia, a (to him) dazzling success; a huge concourse, five or six hundred folk, a vast hall and perfect brazen assurance and audibility on Célimare’s part. Il s’est révélé conferencier.
At the time of the American tour James was, as Brooks notes, at the height of his powers and on his way to being hailed, not always in tones of envy or irony, as the Master. Yet he was not happy. At sixty he was feeling his age, and in his big old house in Rye he was isolated and lonely. In December 1903 he wrote to his friend Grace Norton in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “The days depart and pass, laden somehow like processional camels—across the desert of one’s solitude”—he could not write badly, even when he was merely moaning over his woes—while the prospect of a jaunt to London only reminds him that the city “is also more filled for me (almost) with ghosts than with the living.”
A complete change of scene was called for. Whereas heretofore he would have yearned toward old loves such as Paris, Venice, or Rome, suddenly, he tells Norton,
I want to “visit” the US more than ever. I increasingly desire to—precisely to do that “visit the country at large”; but as I am also increasingly frightened, myself, at my desire, you may take comfort—my fear will perhaps paralyse me.
But his restlessness, along with the prospect of a fattened bank balance, oiled his joints and staved off paralysis. In January he bought a new steamer trunk, and over the following six months he visited his tailor to be kitted out for the trip, booked a ticket on the Kaiser Wilhelm II out of Southampton in August, rented Lamb House to a newly married couple who agreed to look after his beloved dachshund, Max, said a fond farewell to Jocelyn Persse and Hendrik Andersen, two among the bevy of epicene young men who were the solace of his autumnal years, and on August 24 set sail for the New World in “a pandemonium of uncertainties and mysteries.”
As Edel has it, “The ‘passionate pilgrim’ was returning home at last, to the New York of his boyhood, the Cambridge of his youth, the new America of which he had had so many hints and glimpses for twenty years.” Brooks sees him not so much as a pilgrim but as an explorer: “He came as a curious observer and, I think, something close to an anthropologist wanting to study the behaviors and thought systems of this unknown new breed of Americans.”
Given so much expectation and thrilled trepidation, anticlimax was inevitable. Even before he set sail there had been ominous rumblings. In particular, William, apparently alarmed to the point of panic by the prospect of a visit from his brother, had written to him of the “good many désagréments to which you inevitably will be subjected, and…the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you.” He went on to cite some of the prospective unpleasantnesses, ranging from the manner in which Americans eat their boiled eggs to the way they speak: “The vocalization of our countrymen is really…so ignobly awful…. It is simply incredibly loathsome.”1 In the event, William took himself off to Greece, alone, in the last months of his brother’s stay in America and only returned shortly before his departure for Europe.
But Henry was not so thoroughly Europeanized that he did not remain, as Brooks writes, “in so many ways an American in his allegiances and moral concerns.” For all that he admired Europeans such as Balzac and George Eliot, “there was an irradicable strain of Nathaniel Hawthorne in his writings as well: an underlying melodramatic conflict of the children of light and the children of darkness.” It is perhaps this almost primitive ranging of opposites that led Jorge Luis Borges to characterize his work as uniquely strange.
James was eager to arrive, and his arrival was eagerly awaited by relatives and numerous close friends, including his Connecticut cousins the Emmets—“the Emmetry”—and, among the friends, Charles Eliot Norton and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Gazing eagerly from the deck of a transfer boat as it steamed into New York Harbor, he was struck immediately by the city’s “particular type of dauntless power…the power of the most extravagant of cities, rejoicing, as with the voice of the morning, in its might, its fortune, its unsurpassable conditions.”
Presently, though, he disembarked at Hoboken and was at once confronted by the “waterside squalor of the great city,” which he found “only too confoundingly familiar and too serenely exempt from change.” Yet at the same time he could not but be impressed by the bustling newness of the place. Indeed, it is the penetration of the shoddy past into the brash present that provokes an early outburst of denunciation bordering on disgust at
the rude cavities, the loose cobbles, the dislodged supports, the unreclaimed pools, of the roadway; the unregulated traffic, as of innumerable desperate drays charging upon each other with tragic long-necked, sharp-ribbed horses…the huddled houses of the other time, red-faced, off their balance, almost prone, as from too conscious an affinity with “saloon” civilization.
He acknowledges that Naples, Tangiers, and Constantinople have “probably nothing braver to flaunt,” but as Brooks observes, “That isn’t the point.”
Things look up considerably when he gets to New York City and there finds rest “in a house of genial but discriminating hospitality”—probably, Brooks surmises, the Players club; surely James was a living definition of the term “clubbable.” But he does not stay long; indeed he fairly fleets through the city and heads for the Jersey Shore, where he will deliver his first lecture.
If he found Hoboken rude and dirty and the old New York that he knew “violently overpainted,” he is frankly appalled by the spanking-new villas of the nouveaux riches of New Jersey. These eyesores seem to say, “We are only installments, symbols, stopgaps…expensive as we are, we have nothing to do with continuity, responsibility, transmission.” Here, in New York’s environs, he is brought smack up against the new materialism: “To make so much money that you won’t, that you don’t ‘mind,’ don’t mind anything—that is, absolutely, I think, the main American formula.” Plus ça change…
After New Jersey, he is off again: “I woke up, by a quick transition, in the New Hampshire mountains,” at William and Alice’s summer house in Chocorua. Despite William’s earlier, flurried discouragements, the fleeting visit seems to have been placid and pleasant.2 Henry genuinely loved his family. Visiting in Cambridge the graves of his parents and his sister, he finds himself helplessly in tears: “I seemed then to know why I had come—& to feel how not to have done so would have been miserably, horribly to miss it.” Into that tiny word “it” so much is packed.
A long, long journey lay ahead of him, and as he traveled more and more deeply into the nation’s vastnesses he found himself more and more disenchanted. He was a frightful snob, as evidenced by many passages in The American Scene and in his novels; his snobbery, however, had its profound side. He was particularly concerned with what he saw as the formlessness of the land itself. Brooks observes:
It’s not that James had much use for squires and parsons as people or as figures in the social hierarchy. It’s rather their ordering effect upon the landscape…which passed directly and, in the long view, rapidly from colonial settlement to capitalist exploitation without ever experiencing the organization of the feudal fief. The arrival of the automobile that allowed the expansion of building along the rural high road (along with the billboard, which James notes with disgust) would then mean the destruction of any near delimitation of town and country, a kind of ungainly national sprawl.
James was deeply concerned with form, not only as an artist but also as a citizen. He was aghast at the incoherence of the American scene: “The ugliness—one pounced, indeed, on this as on a talisman for the future—was the so complete abolition of forms.” Here Brooks is unequivocal in his support of James’s frequently harsh judgments: “For all of James’s aesthetic snobbery, he is not wrong in his strictures on the American pastoral. The land’s all right; what you have done with it is not.”
Another of James’s abiding concerns was what he characterized as the “perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there had been a past to repudiate.” This he imputes to the persistent infantilization of American society; it was his perception, Brooks writes, “that American democracy is predicated upon its children, enamored of the future rather than the past.” It could be argued, of course, that the repudiation of the past was, and is, the bedrock of American success, with the country forcing itself always to look forward and not back, eager for the new, best thing.
He was unsettled, too, Brooks notes, by “the ingurgitation of immigrants, arriving in numbers that would peak three years later with 11,747 in one day, 1,004,756 for the year.” In this regard he would not have been able to keep from his mind the fact that his grandfather, the founder of the family’s great though rapidly diminished fortune, was a farmer from County Cavan who arrived in the US in the late 1700s, settled in Albany, and became the second-richest man in the state after John Jacob Astor. His grandson, though badly shaken by a visit to Ellis Island, recognizes that the good old America that he knew, or fancies he knew, must undergo “the indignity of change” and accept the “affirmed claim of the alien, however immeasurably alien, to share in one’s supreme relation,” that is, “one’s relation to one’s country.”
And what of the indigenous peoples transfigured into aliens by the arrival of the European settlers? The closing pages of The American Scene are an uncharacteristically clear and direct indictment of what the capitalist ethos has done to “the great lonely land.” James fixes on the Pullman car as the very symbol of the “cushioned and kitchened” new, moneyed society sitting in its padded seats and looking down through plate glass at the huddled masses on either side of the track. Here he imagines himself in the place of “one of the painted savages you have dispossessed” and through this figure delivers his lament for all that has been lost:
Beauty and charm would be for me in the solitude you have ravaged, and I should owe you my grudge for every disfigurement and every violence, for every wound with which you have caused the face of the land to bleed…. You touch the great lonely land…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.
After such raging, how to turn, without plunging into bathos, to the question indicated in the title of the late Denis Donoghue’s final book, The Correction of Taste, a collection of essays on the—to some readers—problematic late novels. Donoghue was a wonderful critic, erudite but never dull, disruptive in his muted way, and possessed of an elegantly flowing prose style that never asserts itself but is always kept in service of the subject. In an afterword his widow, Melissa Malouf—“my colleague in all things Jamesian,” Donoghue writes, “and my partner in all other things,” and now emerita professor at Duke University—catches the tone of the book and the methods of its author:
Patience, paying attention, wondering, elucidating without an end in view—Denis brings these practices to bear on the later novels that James’s brother William thought were too demanding, too outré, too sexually complicated and whispery.3
In his introduction, Donoghue gives almost as much attention to T.S. Eliot as he does to Henry James. He writes, with a straight face, that when Eliot settled in London “he took upon himself an immense project, nothing less than the conversion of Britain to Anglo-Catholicism and the acceptance of Original Sin as first article of religious belief”—Donoghue, it should be noted, remained throughout his life a devout Roman Catholic. Having failed in this grand projet, Eliot “resorted to a more ascertainable plan, that of improving British manners.”
Donoghue takes his title from Eliot’s essay “The Function of Criticism,” the relevant passage of which he quotes in the introduction: “Criticism…must always profess an end in view, which, roughly speaking, appears to be the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.” In his teasing and drily witty fashion, Donoghue says he takes Eliot to mean by that ultimate phrase “that if something is in bad taste it should be corrected by appeal to good taste,” and he goes on to assert:
Good taste is the custom by which we like something with the right liking. That is the direction of good teaching. The function of criticism—as of good teaching—is to lead students, readers, to like something for the right reason and then to be able to expound that reason.
Take that, Mr. Eliot.
Donoghue embarked on this book, he writes, because in revisiting James’s The Ambassadors (1903), he found himself in disagreement with the standard reading of that novel—though he does not define what the standard reading is, nor indeed does he say why he disagrees with it, whatever it may be. Instead he offers an excursus on James’s 1909 short story “Crapy Cornelia,” in which he encounters the matter of taste in various forms.
Donoghue identifies one of James’s novels as tasteless tout court. Although James himself regarded The Other House (1896) as “a divine little light to walk by,” it is an exceedingly somber affair, a piece of petit guignol with a plot that Hollywood in its lushest heyday would have rejected as too ridiculous: a dying mother extracts a promise from her husband not to remarry while their daughter is alive, leading an admirer of his to murder the girl. “James has here,” Donoghue writes, “a cast of central characters who wouldn’t know the subtleties of tact if they smacked them in the face.” The tastelessness on display within the walls of The Other House is beyond correcting. Sometimes the Master faltered, and sometimes he came a proper cropper.
At one point in the chapter “Henry James and the Great Tradition,” Donoghue himself strays perilously close to the boundaries of good taste, if indeed he does not overstep them. Writing of The Awkward Age (1899) he pauses at a bit of silliness in the plot involving a book that has been playfully hidden from a chap called Petherton by a girl called Aggie. “Maybe Aggie is sitting on it,” Donoghue suggests, and goes on, ill-advisedly, to observe that “this is the moment at which the novel gratifies the interest of Queer Studies,” since the word “hand” has been “transposed by scholarly desire into ‘fist,’ instrument of anal practice.”
He resumes his accustomed decorousness in the chapters on the three late, great novels: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl. In writing on The Ambassadors, he calls up an exchange in which Mrs. Pocock—James had a wicked way with names—ironically commends the central character, Lambert Strether, on having the good taste to keep silent about her brother Chad’s affair with a high-born Frenchwoman. Donoghue’s gloss here is odd but provocative:
[Mrs. Pocock] has caught Strether on his weak side or has caught taste on its weak side, that it consorts willingly enough with evil. Taste, as a benign substitute for religion, has only the weak device of calling some behaviour bad taste.
Is there not a touch of Christian casuistry here? Well, what if there is? Donoghue has as much right to his religious distinctions as Henry James had to his exquisitely fine discriminations.
In The Correction of Taste we do not find Donoghue at his topmost bent; all the same it is at once a subtle study of James’s intricate late work and a splendid reminder of what a fine critic Donoghue was. And the foreword by Colm Tóibín, who studied under Donoghue when the latter occupied the chair of Modern English and American Literature at University College, Dublin, is a mini-memoir of a time when to be young was very heaven, and also a beautifully crafted tribute to a superb teacher who knew that the function of criticism is not only to correct taste but, simply yet all-importantly, to quote Donoghue again, “to lead students, readers, to like something for the right reason.”
English (US) · 