The U.S. had become a largely unfamiliar country filled with strange new architectures and foreign voices. And while James had hoped to rediscover his homeland with freshly scrubbed perceptions (much as, when a young man, he first discovered his love for Italy, France, and London) he soon found himself just as “lost in America” as Albert Brooks would a century later. “The very sign of its energy,” he went on to write in his late, impressive, and often complexly difficult travel memoir, The American Scene, in 1907:
It’s the sort of convoluted passage that runs throughout The American Scene, often taking as much time for a reader to unravel as James spent raveling it. Basically, James argues that early twentieth-century America liked to “gild” things just long enough to fool observers into believing they were worth gilding; but as soon as this illusion fades away or wears off, America quickly moves on to purveying the next one.
Henry James Comes Home arrives as a late companion piece to preeminent Jamesian scholar Peter Brooks’s earlier, similarly structured book, Henry James Goes to Paris (2007), which described James’s youthful engagements with Turgenev, Zola, Sand, and Flaubert—during which he learned, or saved away to adopt later in life, those “modern” fictional techniques that distinguished French novelists in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Along the way, Brooks examined how these techniques came to be used in James’s greatest novels, such as The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove. In these works, Brooks wrote, “James appears to reach back to lessons learned in Paris in the mid-1870s—to the lessons of Flaubert, but also more generally to what he picked up in the city that was inventing modernism. It’s as if what James rejected in 1875–76 had lain dormant in him ever since, only coming to flower at the fin de siècle.”
Over the decades, whether Brooks rowed against the critical currents or those currents were belatedly catching up with him, he has remained one of the few literary critics who could write sentences and paragraphs with clarity, concision, and even beauty in them. His books, while energized with critical perspective and opinion, don’t wear readers down with a lot of academic jargon. And he is often as pleasurable to read as the artists he writes about.
a gigantic and elaborate a monument to all that isn’t socially possible there. It’s, in effect, like a gorgeous practical joke—but at one’s own expense, after all, if one has to live in solitude in these league-long marble halls, & sit in alternate Gothic and Palladian cathedrals, as it were—where now only the temperature stalks about—with the “regrets,” sighing along the wind, of those who have declined.… I feel that in speaking of it as I have, I don’t do justice to the house as a phenomenon (of brute achievement). But that truly wd. take me too far! It’s only as a place to live in, & in the conditions fatally imposed, that I, before it, threw up my hands—!
James grew up in a large, boisterously intelligent family. His father, Henry Sr., had lost his right leg to extraordinarily painful childhood surgeries (without anesthetic) and used the large inheritance from his father to read deeply in various disciplines, eventually favoring the great theosophist crackpot, Swedenborg. With his wife, he traveled the world seeking educational opportunities for his six precocious children and traveled with private tutors through London, Switzerland, Italy, and France. The six children were raucous with intelligence; Henry quickly learned to prefer Europe as a fulfillment of social life. One of the preeminent ghost story writers of the last two centuries, he saw apparitions everywhere: they floated through the lives of people who had been living in the same homes over generations until their spiritual histories were almost inextricable from the walls, rooms, and furnishings.
specimens, on show, of what the Government can do with people with whom it is supposed able to do nothing. They seemed just then and there, for a mind fed betimes on the Leatherstocking Tales, to project as in a flash an image in itself immense, but foreshortened and simplified—reducing to a single smooth stride the bloody footsteps of time.
As James writes early in The American Scene, “One’s supreme relation … was one’s relation to one’s country.” James didn’t journey to America simply to see what he had left behind; he went there to see what parts of himself he had left behind with it, and whether any of those broken pieces were worth recovering. The answer, it seems, was a very firm no.
Brooks is is unusually refreshing in his willingness to read so generously a writer from another century who doesn’t always live up to the way we read now. James’s observations can read like the mutterings of an insensitive middle-class man who doesn’t like seeing new neighbors move in down the block. Whether visiting Ellis Island and feeling a “chill in his heart” that the “‘sanctity of his American consciousness’… must be shared with ‘the inconceivable alien’” or wandering through crowds of strangers in the skyscraper-looming streets of Manhattan, James continually reflects on how America can no longer appreciate its own American-ness amid the continuous din of
Snobbery, obviously; but as Brooks argues, not so much racist or nationalistic as disappointed in the chaotic flowing of strangers and laborers marching to the beat of commerce and nothing else.
Brydon’s expedition into his former American properties leads him to discover, or intuit, the ghost of the man he might have been had he never escaped to Europe—an alternate self that has been transformed into an “awful beast” with a mutilated hand and a “rage of personality” powerful enough to sustain him in the jungle of American commerce. In other words, the sort of man who could no longer appreciate Europe’s rich, alternative possibilities, and who lived only for his “million a year.”
The result is a travel memoir that records the delight and consternation of a writer revisiting a country he both couldn’t leave behind and couldn’t abide as a permanent home. And the conclusions he eventually reached were so dark that they caused his American publishers to leave them out (along with the entire final chapter), even though they had been included in the British edition only one week previously. James’s thoughts in that final chapter are as angry and denunciatory as just about anything written by a popular American novelist:
He then accuses America of offering a “pretended message of civilization” which, at its mercenary heart, “is but a colossal recipe for the creation of arrears.” This vision of an America that deploys ideals of “freedom” in order to force “arrears” on anybody dumb enough to buy them—like a con man selling a game nobody but the con man can win—sounds much like the America we endure today.
Had James lived long enough to describe his westward journeys through California and the Pacific Northwest in a planned second volume, The Sense of the West, he might have brought a softer conclusion to his American sojourn. But he chose to skip those already-recorded adventures in order to bring emphasis to his dark conclusions, so maybe he knew (as he usually did) what he was doing. After all, when James returned, a few weeks later, to his beloved Lamb House in Sussex, his frequent dinner companions, and his dogs, he was performing his final, genuine act of “coming home.” For it was in Sussex—and not America—where his heart, at the end, truly lay.
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