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"The nameless force at play": The psychology of travel in the writings of Henry James
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“THE NAMELESS FORCE AT PLAY”:
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TRAVEL
IN THE WRITINGS OF HENRY JAMES
By
Gregory Curtis Vieira
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1998
© 1998 Gregory Curtis Vieira
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
......................................
under the direction of h...±s..... Dissertation
Committee, and approved by aU its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean af Graduate Studies
D a t e A p jriX 8 ;_ 1 9 9 8
[ON COMMITTEE D I!
Chairperson
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To Sophia,
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Acknowledgements
From its inception, and every step along the way, Ron Gottesman has contributed
generously to this project, particularly by helping me to appreciate the presence of
psychology in literature. TTiroughout, he has been a steady source o f encouragement,
inspiration and good intentions, opening my eyes to possibilities that were not
always apparent. I am also indebted to Tim Gustafson and Moshe Lazar for seeing
me through the completion o f this project.
Anthony Kemp, Joseph Dane and Dagmar Bamouw have likewise offered ideas,
inspiration and encouragement. I also thank Peter Manning, Ross Winterowd, Hilary
Schor, Jim Kincaid, Teresa Faherty, Luther Luedtke, Robert Grant, Brian Finley,
Max Schultz, Alice Gambrell, Leo Braudy, Vicky Silver, Irene Clark, Des Harding,
Teanna Rizkallah and Wade Harper.
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Table o f Contents
1. Potential Space: A Psychology of Travel 1
2. “Dawdling and Gaping”: Understanding James’s Peripatetic Youth 27
3. “Spells and Almost Miracles”: James’s Travel Writings 54
4. Travel in James’s Short Fiction 87
5. “A Mild Adventure”: Travel in James’s Novels 128
6. Playing and Reality in The American Scene 178
Bibliography 211
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Abstract
“We were for considerable periods, during our earliest time, nothing less than
hotel children” writes Henry James, reflecting on the perpetual and often puzzling
movements of his family back and forth between the United States and Europe.
James was, in fact, brought up in a traveling culture: after the civil war, increasingly
affluent and mobile Americans in reverse colonization invaded Europe in order to
bring home cultural artifacts and impressions. As one o f those who roamed Europe
and America, James came to identify himself as a “traveler,” a self-conception that
influenced his writings throughout his career.
Examining several of the genres James worked in—travel writing,
autobiography, the short story and the novel—this dissertation identifies “a
psychology of travel” that imbues them all. Indeed, as James’s career progressed, he
developed an ever-deepening awareness of the psychological spaces between the
observer and the observed, and became increasingly intent on laying bare the
processes by which he reached conclusions regarding his experience as a perpetual
outsider.
The introduction works towards a definition of this psychology of travel by
introducing the ideas of object-relations psychologist D. W. Winnicott, particularly
his concepts of “play,” “transitional objects” and “potential space,” and applying
them to the genre of travel writing, thereby creating a link between what Winnicott
describes as creative living and the processes involved in travel and travel writing.
Winnicott developed a psychological approach that shifted the emphasis from the
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subject—an isolated psyche—to one that included the object—the surrounding
environment—as well, suggesting that the relationship between subject and object,
given the proper circumstances, fosters “creative apperception.” James’s travels
serve as an apt example of Winnicott’s theories because, throughout his career,
James maintains an allegiance to both inner and outer states, tethering a reporter’s
concern for objectivity with the artist’s obligation to psychic truth.
The second chapter begins by examining James’s early years, many of them
spent on the road with his family. James gathered many of his initial impressions of
the polarities of travel— home and abroad—from his father who wrote, “I was never
so happy at home as away from it.” I suggest that James was brought up in a
traveling culture, that he internalized his father’s restlessness, that he learned to view
himself through the prism of his travels, and that he began to associate his travels
with his creativity; this association is particularly evident in the first o f his
autobiographies, A Small Bov and Others.
When James left his family to begin his life abroad, he initially supported
himself, albeit with some financial assistance from his father, by writing travel
articles, and the next chapter explores James’s travel writings—primarily English
Hours. A Little Tour in France and Italian Hours—focusing on James’s attempts to
describe the psychic space between himself and the world around him. Each
country—England, France and Italy—represents a different level of comfort, and
therefore a distinct challenge, for James as he attempts to integrate the disparate
elements of himself and his environment through travel writing.
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vii
James, however, did not restrict his ideas about travel to the travel sketches;
he carried that preoccupation with traveling into his fictional writings and chapter 4
explores James’s attempts to write a psychology o f travel into many of his short
stories. “Traveling Companions,” “A Passionate Pilgrim,” “Daisy Miller,” “The
Great Good Place,” and “The Jolly Comer” are examined and show that James,
through the creation of a variety of travelers, reveals different ways of responding to
the relationship between inner states and the outside world.
The next chapter examines three novels—The American. The Portrait of a
Lady, and The Ambassadors: like the short stories, these novels also show a
refinement of the figure of the traveler as James’s view of the possibilities and the
consequences of travel matured. Each of these novels further elaborates upon the
theme of the conscientious traveler, the protagonists of the novels travel both
inwardly and outwardly, an approach to travel highlighted through contrast to their
travelling companions who are more concerned with shopping and cigars than the
psychological aspects o f travel.
The concluding chapter investigates The American Scene, a book in which
James further explores the connections between the observer and the observed, but
with an added complication—the specter of personal history—blurring the
distinction between inner and outer worlds. In 1904, James returned after an absence
of twenty years to what in many ways appeared to be a foreign country. In
attempting to forge a connection to the American scene James uncovered two
problems: at times the connection appeared too faint and he could not create the
bridge between himself and his environment, while at other times the scene was
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obliterated by waves of nostalgia. The American Scene transcribes James’s quest for
that missing connection, the place of balance, similar to what Winnicott calls the area
of “experiencing,” in which the equilibrium between inner and outer reality is
attained.
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1
Chapter One
Potential Space: A Psychology o f Travel
This great world, which some multiply
further as being only a species under one
genus, is the mirror in which we must look
at ourselves to recognize ourselves from
the proper angle.
Montaigne—Essays I, xxvi
A traveler. I love his title. A traveler is to
be reverenced as such. His profession is
the best symbol o f our life. Going from—
toward; it is the history of every one o f us.
Thoreau—Journal, July 2, 1851
Generic distinctions are notoriously slippery and we find this no less
true in creating a category called “travel literature.” In trying to enumerate
the members that would make up such a class, we are faced with writings as
diverse as scientific and state sponsored explorations like those of Darwin
and Columbus; journeys as much inward as outward, as displayed in the
travel writings of Henry David Thoreau, D. H. Lawrence and Paul Theroux;
imaginary travels like those of Swift’s Gulliver and Bunyon’s A Pilgrim’s
Progress: emigrations such as the one described by William Bradford in On
Plymouth Plantation: not to mention those dispatches intended for serial
publication which we find in the travel section of the newspaper. Where is
it that we can make meaningful generic distinctions? To make distinctions
based on the object poles of the travel experience—on one end the traveler,
and on the other the location traveled to—seems needlessly arbitrary. We
need not conclude that circumnavigating the globe or landing on the moon
is a better or more typical example of travel than hiking through the Maine
woods or sauntering through the woods surrounding Walden Pond; both
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2
excursions involve leaving home and entering a strange new world. Nor
will we be served by basing our classification on the literary credentials of
the writer, some of the most interesting travel writing comes from
individuals who are not known for their literary abilities as is evidenced by
Georg Forster’s account o f A Voyage Round the World which he undertook
as a scientist traveling with Captain Cook. But if we do not base our
distinctions on the traveler or the destination, where are we to draw the
lines? I will suggest that there is a different way of framing the question of
genre as it applies to “travel literature.”
Murray Schwartz, a writer on literature and psychology, offers one
suggestive side-step around the problem of genre by ignoring the question
“what is literature”—which he claims is typically predetermined in the
critic’s mind—and replacing that line of inquiry with the question asked in
the title of his essay, “Where is Literature?” (1975). Schwartz recognizes
that defining literature by either the object or the subject—the text ot the
reader—is an interminable problem, and therefore he rewrites the question:
“The question remains: if not here, in my experience of it, or there, in the
world of objects to be correctly read by a generalized ‘we,’ then where is
literature?” (56). Schwartz finds that literature is something that is
paradoxically neither inside nor outside of us but rather in the interplay
between. Borrowing the concept o f “potential space” from D. W.
Winnicott, Schwartz gives his definition of “literature”:
Literature is written language located in potential space,
the language we locate there. Since each of us lives out
his or her own identity and its variations in interaction
with social and historical circumstances, each of us
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3
brings to the literary transaction a unique style of
attempting to unite inner and outer realities—our
potential spaces and transitional objects are often shared
but never identical. (61)
The phrase “a unique style of attempting to unite inner and outer realities”
is not only helpful in describing reading, but it also helps us understand
travel, which, like reading, also serves as an act of interpretation. As
Schwartz calls attention to individual styles of reading, we can also talk
about individual styles o f traveling.
Paul Fussel, editor of The Norton Book of Travel, seems to be
following a similar line o f reasoning when he attempts to unravel the genre
of travel writing, discussing the difference between “explorers, tourists, and
genuine travelers.” He suggests we separate these groups by what they learn
from their travels:
Explorers leant the contours of undiscovered shorelines
and mountains, tourists leant exchange rates and where to
go in Paris for the best hamburgers, and travelers learn,..
. if they are lucky, humility. Experiencing on their senses
a world different from their own, they realize their
provincialism and recognize their ignorance. (13-14)
Here, Fussel does not distinguish travel literature based on the length of
voyages or destinations; he recognizes that it is not in the poles of the
experience but in the interplay between the poles that travel becomes
interesting. It is in one’s manner of experiencing the world that one
becomes, what Fussel terms, “a genuine traveler.” Travelers each have their
own “style of attempting to unite inner and outer realities” and the best
travel writing brings out the writer’s awareness of this process of explaining
the world. As Fussel suggests, “successful travel writing mediates between
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4
two poles: the individual physical things it describes, on the one hand, and
the larger theme that it is ‘about,’ on the other” (16). The writer mediates
between what is seen and what he or she thinks about the object seen and
out of this reciprocal relationship comes something that exists neither inside
nor outside, but in the creative space between.
In this study of Henry James I plan to enlist the theories of D. W.
Winnicott, English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, in helping us to
understand the psychological dynamics of travel. His theories about
“transitional objects” and “potential spaces” shed light on the origins of
creativity and help us address the question “where is travel?”—what is the
psychological space that is filled when one travels? To this end, I will begin
with an explanation of Winnicott’s theories, particularly his concepts
“transitional objects,” “potential space” and “play,” and then I will show
how these ideas offer an insight into travel and travel literature.
1
Peter Rudnytsky, editor of Transitional Objects and Potential
Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott. muses over the strange
circumstance that Winnicott, “a foremost representative of the British
Independent tradition of object relations theory” is relatively unused in
literary criticism: “There must be ten literary critics conversant with Lacan’s
Ecrits for every one who has read Winnicott’s Playing and Reality” (xi).
Whatever the reasons for this neglect, Winnicott has been used fruitfully in
a couple of areas. Winnicott’s ideas, for example, lend themselves to
investigating the psychology of English Romanticism,1 and object-relations
theory in general has enriched readings of complex characters such as
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5
Hamlet and MacBeth, two characters whose grip on external reality is
tenuous at best.2 And as noted above, Winnicott has also been used by
Murray Schwartz in his inquiry into the psychological space wherein we
experience literature. This study will bring his ideas into another area,
helping uncover a psychology of travel, specifically as it relates to Henry
James’s travels and travel related writings.
Just as literary criticism has developed dialectically—new ideas
have risen in opposition to those already established—so has psychological
thought. Winnicott’s theories developed as a response to prior
psychological ideas, one of which was Freudian drive theory.3 Freud chose
to see human behavior as the result of internal drives or instincts, a choice
that precluded considering apparently extraneous factors as influences on
human behavior. In this view internal objects, such as an idealized mother,
are not the result o f one’s experience of one’s mother as much as they are
the product of fundamental drives within us. Like the New Critic calling
our attention to the text itself, Freud points to the individual as being o f sole
importance in understanding psychology. Winnicott writes with
appreciation of Freud, claiming he does not want to subvert Freud so much
as he wants to enlarge our understanding of the influences upon our
psychology. While Freud focused on the psychological contents, “Winnicott
expanded the field o f psychoanalytic exploration to include a study of the
development of the space in which mental contents, functions, and
structures, as well as interpersonal relations, exist” (Ogden 7).
Winnicott is usually considered part of a group of British
psychoanalysts, along with Melanie Klein, W. R. D. Fairbaim and others,
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6
who disrupted the perspective that the self is a thing unto itself. Rather,
they argued for an environmental definition o f the self, one that takes into
account all that surrounds it. But while these British theorists brought the
external object into psychology they did not become sociologists,
abandoning the subject; they tried to find a psychological perspective that
brought subject and object together into what Stephen Mitchell has called a
“relational matrix.” Mitchell describes this matrix metaphorically: “In this
perspective the figure is always jn the tapestry, and the threads of the
tapestry (via identifications and introjections) are always in the figure” (3).
The psychoanalytic subject cannot be extracted from his or her environment
and examined in itself: “A personality is not something one has, but
something one does. Consistent patterns develop, but the patterning is not
reflective of something ‘inside.’ Rather, the patterns reflect learned modes
of dealing with situations and are therefore always in some sense responsive
to and shaped by the situations themselves” (25).
Winnicott’s investigation into this relationship between internal and
external spaces begins with the assumption that any account of human
behavior that weighs heavily in either direction, explaining from within or
from without, has to be incomplete because such interpretations do not
account for creativity. Both views, Winnicott argues, depict a predictable,
sterile world:
Looking first at external reality and the individual’s
contact with external reality in terms of object-relation
and object-usage, one sees that external reality itself is
fixed; moreover, the instinctual endowment that provides
the backing for object-relating and object-use is itself
fixed for the individual, though it varies according
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to phase and age, and the individual’s freedom to make
use of instinctual drives. Here we are more free or less
free according to the laws that have been formulated in
considerable detail in the psychoanalytic literature.
fPlaving and Reality 106)
Explanations that focus on the external, such as behaviorism, and those that
focus on the internal, such as Freudian thought, do not allow a space for
human creativity. Everything is determined either externally, by one’s
family and culture, or internally, owing its psychological character to “to
inheritance, to the personality organization, and to environmental factors in-
trojected and to personal factors projected” (106). Assuming that humans
are creative and unique, Winnicott worked to find a way around this
problem of internal and external determination.
It is in response to the limitations of these two views, that Winnicott
developed his theory of “potential space,” a theory which expands upon the
determined areas of internal and external reality, offering a third aspect to
human nature, a realm between the inner and the outer worlds:
the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we
cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to
which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is
an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made
on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place
for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of
keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated.
(Playing 2)
This third area which Winnicott calls “potential space” provides an
opportunity for “play” or “cultural experience” and its importance, given
what Winnicott calls a “good-enough mother,” is that it allows individuals
the chance to experience creativity: when a “baby is given sensitive
management here where the mother is separating out from the baby. . . the
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8
area for play is immense.” In other words, it is in separation from the
mother that creativity is bom, but separating is not all; Winnicott argued
that the quality of the child’s separation was the key, suggesting that the
immensity of that space is only helpful when it is unthreatening, such as
when the presence of the mother is felt; take away the comfortable
surroundings and that immensity invokes terror. The child in a potential
space is therefore vulnerable, but along with that vulnerability comes
possibilities for growth: “The thing about playing is always the
precariousness of the interplay of personal psychic reality and the
experience of control of actual objects. This is the precariousness of magic
itself, magic that arises in intimacy, in a relationship that is being found to
be reliable” (47). It is because of its fluidity, its experiential nature, that
“potential space” offers a response to the determining facts o f genetics and
physics: “The special feature of this place where play and cultural
experience have a position is that it depends for its existence on living
experiences, not on inherited tendencies” (108). In other words, it is a
place where reality is not fixed; because it is based on “living experience”
and the variables inherent in that equation, the way we relate inner and outer
realities becomes an x-factor that allows for novelty and creativity.
Winnicott came upon these ideas through his observations of
children, by recognizing the transitional objects children use as substitutes
in their mother’s absence. In his theory o f the “transitional object”
Winnicott comments upon the way everyday objects—blankets, dolls—
become magical talismans that bring security in a somewhat unstable world:
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9
In the experience o f the more fortunate baby (and small
child and adolescent and adult) the question of separation
in separating does not arise, because in the potential
space between the baby and the mother there appears the
creative playing that arises naturally out of the relaxed
state; it is here that there develops a use of symbols that
stand at one and the same time for external world
phenomena and for phenomena of the individual person
who is being looked a t (Playing 108-9)
A well intentioned separation from the mother leads directly towards entry
into a symbolic and creative world: “separation is avoided by the filling in
of the potential space with creative playing, with the use of symbols, and
with all that eventually adds up to a cultural life” (109). At first we have
recourse to blankets and such; later in life we enter the symbolic world of
language and art.
Winnicott’s ideas about “potential space” and “transitional objects”
do not simply point to a phenomenon of childhood; rather they illuminate an
ongoing process of life. The experience of creating transitional objects
originates in infancy but it nevertheless continues throughout our lives. He
writes, “It is assumed here that the task of reality-acceptance is never
completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and
outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate
area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.)” (Playing
13). What the child needs, this “potential space” wherein inner and outer
worlds are bridged, is just as important to the life of an adult because the
ability to inhabit this space is a significant measure of one’s psychic health:
“It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the
individual feel that life is worth living. Contrasted with this is a relationship
to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details
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10
being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding
adaptation” (65). The playing that takes place in “potential space” gives
one a feeling of freedom and creativity, replacing the feeling that one is
engaged in stifling routine.
Along with his claim that this type o f playing is necessary for an
appreciation of life in general, Winnicott claims that only in playing can we
leam to approach self-knowledge: “It is in playing and only in playing that
the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole
personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the
self’ (54). Self discovery is the product of trust and relaxation, in other
words, a responsiveness to one’s surroundings, whether they be exterior or
interior. Along with this insight, Winnicott further suggests that “only in
playing is communication possible” (54). And again, this is because one
needs to be relaxed and responsive to truly communicate; one has to be able
to acknowledge both inner and outer states, oneself and the other speaker,
for meaningful communication. Play, for Winnicott is always an
acknowledgment of inner and outer states as we attempt to navigate the
space in between. Subsequently, it is when one of these poles, the inner or
the outer, is not acknowledged that madness occurs. As Winnicott contin
ues to remind us, play and creativity are only healthy when tethered to
reality. Madness is not being able to negotiate between inner and outer
worlds, reacting to things that are not there, or over-reacting, as in paranoia,
to things that are, while “play” includes a recognition of actual objects. In
Freudian psychology the outer world is only relevant in that it shows the
projections of our inner world. Winnicott suggests that the outer world has
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1 1
to be dealt with as a separate and real entity and that our psychology results
from the ways we relate inner and outer worlds. Because of this focus, I
will suggest that Winnicott’s theories work well at suggesting a psychology
of travel.
2
Travel is so frequent a subject and motif in literature it has prompted
one critic to suggest, “the motif of the voyage counts among the most
manifestly banal in Western letters” (Van Den Abbeele xiii). One can begin
with Homer’s Odvssev and create an inexhaustible catalogue of works that
focus upon or organize themselves around travel. Even autobiographies,
which one might expect to be self-organizing according to the passage of
time, often make the writer’s travels the bare bones upon which they drape
their living flesh. Some reasons for the use of travel might seem prosaic.
For instance Mark Twain often relied on the travel narrative because it
offered a ready made structure for his books; critics have suggested that
Twain had difficulty structuring longer works (Bridgman 1). Yet even
supposing such a practical reason, Richard Bridgman, in Traveling in Mark
Twain, finds that Twain also had deeper, more complicated reasons for his
interest in traveling. Bridgman suggests Twain’s experience of travel is
well represented by the description of a Horace Greeley letter in Roughing
It. Twain claims to have an incomprehensible letter from Greeley, about
which Bridgman writes: “The humor is built on Greeley’s execrable
handwriting, which makes the text of this important letter susceptible to
several different interpretations, each as problematic as the next” (39).
Bridgman’s argument is that Twain’s frustration over this letter points to the
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12
larger issue of trying to make sense of this world we live in, suggesting
Greeley’s barely legible letter represents “a scrawled world that yielded a
variety of uncertain and by and large unwelcome interpretations” (41).
Twain traveled habitually, not only to find material for writing, but because
“perpetual movement seemed the answer to the precariousness of life. He
moved to keep from sinking” (149). As Bridgman shows, despite the
banality of the travel motif, we also find many individual twists in the use
and interpretations of travel in literature.
Accordingly, as one can identify many different motives for
traveling, theories accounting for the importance of travel in our lives
abound. Perhaps the most common interpretation of travel, apparent in the
rhetoric of travel agents and army recruiters, is that travel broadens the self;
that the traveler “endure not yet/ A breach, but an expansion,/ Like gold to
ayery thinnesse beate.” O f course it is difficult to think about the expansion
of the self when there are still arguments about the nature of the “self.”4
Yet, despite the difficulty of defining the self, we operate on certain
assumptions about its nature and one such assumption is that it can grow,
becoming more independent and self-satisfying. I contend that this idea that
one can find self-fulfillment and personal growth through travel, while
present to some degree in classical writings, becomes pervasive in the
eighteenth century with the Enlightenment because at this time we see both
an increase in knowledge of the world, this is the age of Cook and
Bougainville and circumnavigations of the globe, coupled with a shift from
a Biblical to a scientific understanding of the self. While men sailed to the
antipodes, religious interpretations were acutely challenged by the
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13
epistemological ideas o f philosophers like Locke who suggested that we
come into the world a tabula rasa, that the mind is an impressionable slate
upon which is impressed all that we experience with our five senses.
Accordingly, if one is limited by one’s surroundings, if one never leaves the
Happy Valley, the opportunity for the psychological growth is limited.
Leaving home and traveling becomes a necessary component of broadening
the self, of making oneself more complete.
This Enlightenment perspective, which still operates in
contemporary American culture, leads one to see the home as limiting and
the expansion of the world through travel as exhilerating. Whether it be
physical or imaginative travel, the traveler seemingly escapes a closed
system, delighting in the possibilities o f diversity and choice. We can see
these enlightenment ideas, for instance, expressed in Montesquieu’s The
Persian Letters, a fictional account of a Persian traveling in Europe. The
traveler, Rhedi, expresses the excitement of travel when he writes about
Venice:
I should be delighted to live in a town where my mind is
developing everyday. I am learning about the secrets of
commerce, the political interests of kings, and the forms
of their government; I do not neglect even the
superstitions of Europe. I am working at medicine,
physics, and astronomy; I am studying the technical
sciences; in brief, I am emerging from the clouds which
covered my eyes in the land where I was bom. (84)
In retrospect, he considers his past self as figuratively blind, a blindness that
is cured when he leaves his home for the wide wonders of the world. We
see a similar theme in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. in which the title
character, brought up in the edenic and static Happy Valley, is also moved
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by the teeming possibilities of life as he finally discovers a way out of the
valley:
The prince looked round with rapture, anticipated all the
pleasures of travel, and in thought was already
transported beyond his father’s dominions.. . . Rasselas
was so much delighted with a wider horizon, that he
could not soon be persuaded to return into the valley.
(2341)
Even before Rasselas leaves the hermeneutically sealed Happy Valley for an
open world of competing interpretations, he is transported intellectually.
That initial transportation is enough to fill him with rapture.
While Johnson and Montesquieu were expressing their society’s
wonder at an expanding world, on the other side of the Atlantic, Benjamin
Franklin was doing the same. In his autobiography, after beginning with an
historical grounding of his family in America, Franklin describes his exit
from a constricted, puritanical Boston, in which his ideas were ridiculed and
he was “pointed at with horror by good people as an infidel or atheist” (35).
He turns away from religious interpretations he had inherited from his
family, abandoning the stifling environment of New England, and heads for
the multivalent, expanding world of Philadelphia, a place in which one
could find the opportunity for self-creation. Franklin’s excitement at this
new world is manifest as he describes the ever expanding print media from
which he benefited and helped to promote. Much of the autobiography is
spent reveling in this new found freedom as Franklin, whether he journeys
between America and Europe or ventures out to the frontier—western
Pennsylvania—finds, in traveling, the possibility for self-creation and
individual expression.
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Enlightenment writers view the self as it appears in the
bildunesroman: one event leads to another and characters grow according to
the temporal experience o f their lives. In this view travel opens the
individual to a dazzling array of possibilities. But with recent attacks on the
Enlightenment project,5 have also come new theories about the meaning of
travel in our lives. One such vein of theory focuses on the political
ramifications of exploration and tourism, focusing on the economic or
political goals satisfied by travel and travel writing.6 While some of these
accounts focus on the impact western travel has on other cultures, some
have tried to show that a psychological satisfaction for the traveler
buttresses those political aims. For example, Edward Said, in Orientalism.
inquires into both aspects o f travel. He not only looks for the effect of
travel writing on the cultures being visited, but also speculates on the
satisfaction gained by the imaginative traveler, the one who vicariously
reaps the fruits of the travel writer’s labors:
For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and
history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself
by dramatizing the distance and difference between what
is close to it and what is far away. This is no less true of
the feelings we often have that we would have been more
‘at home’ in the sixteenth century or in Tahiti. (55)
While Said is suggesting that we gain perspective on our own lives through
the creation of “others,” he is also pointing to the way physical travel
becomes linked in our minds with other kinds of knowledge. Physical travel
leads inevitably to imaginary travel when the traveler returns to tell his or
her tale, and at this point there is little difference between knowing places—
Tahiti—and knowing history—the sixteenth century. Both are internalized
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representations o f the “other” that seemingly help to define and pin down
the self, to “help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself,” while
paradoxically enlarging our view of the world around us.
While our first impulse is to recognize the liberating nature of travel,
Said introduces the idea that travel is also conservative and self-constricting.
One of the best accounts of this aspect to travel is Georges Van Den
Abbeele’s Travel as Metaphor from Montaigne to Rousseau, in which he
examines the impact travel and travel writing have on the traveling culture,
specifically examining their relation to the French philosophical tradition.
Van Dan Abbeele begins with an etymology of the word “metaphor” in
order to show a precise link between metaphorical thinking and physical
transportation, and from this insight he suggests we can see the implicit
relationship between voyages and critical thinking, both of which are
attempts to know more about the world and about ourselves. Because of
this relationship, Van Den Abbeele suggests that there is a reflection
between our ideas about travel and our ideas about knowledge, our
philosophies. The significance of travel, as Van Den Abbeele sees it in
these French writers, is not so much that it liberates them mentally, although
it does that to some degree, but rather that their mental and physical
journeys are conditioned by their starting point. In other words, travel is not
merely liberation; rather, an integral part of the journey remains the home.
Travel is circular because it posits an original point that serves as a
beginning and ending (xviii). Therefore, Van Den Abbeele locates a tension
between the idea that travel is important for one’s education and the need to
bring experiences back home, to synthesize whatever knowledge is gained
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and make it amenable to one’s previous ideas. In the end, he argues, these
French writers show that the “end of the speculative voyage is the return to
the beginning, the same” (8).
While Said and Van Den Abbeele both stress that travel gives one
the illusion of a more defined boundary around the self, Janis Stout, in The
Journey Narrative in American Literature, presents another perspective. She
suggests that travel, in changing our experience of space and time, promotes
an environment wherein we gain insight into the fluid nature o f the self,
disrupting the false notion that the self is a stable entity unimplicated in its
surroundings:
the journey can readily be used as a metaphor for the
passage of time or for the penetration into different levels
of consciousness. . . . The reason why this
interchangeability exists is probably easier to grasp than
to state, but clearly derives from the ways in which we
perceive flux and duration. That is, it involves the
elemental questions of epistemology, the relation
between subject and object, knower and known. In such
a relation, as we address the environment, we assume
instinctively that we ourselves are fixed points with
changes occurring around us. If we pause to consider
that ourselves as consciousness are also changing
phenomena, then we become bifurcated selves, split into
considering subject and considered object (the past self or
whatnot). Such an experience of bifurcation o f the self
illustrates the way in which modes of perception of the
outer world can be transferred to the perception o f the
inner self. It is precisely this capacity for mirroring the
inward voyage, an archetypal form in which movement
through the geographic world becomes an analogue for
the process of introspection. (14)
Travel writing has the potential for being a mere collection of observations,
but because one surveys a world that changes according to the movements
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of the writer, one also has opportunity for insight into the self; the observing
self seamlessly turns toward self-observation. As Emerson suggests in
Nature. “The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms
things to thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as
fluid, and impresses his being thereon” (34). What Emerson calls “the
poet,” in the light of Stout’s observations, might be called “the traveler”—
the one who recognizes the interplay between external and internal states.
3
D. W. Winnicott’s psychological theories offer yet another way of
understanding our fascination with travel; his ideas about “potential space,”
“transitional objects” and “play” help illuminate the paradox that travel is at
once liberating and constricting. In that paradox lies an important key to
understanding the relationship between travel and creativity. Winnicott,
admittedly, restricted his clinical focus to children and expressed skepticism
about the ability to conclude definitively on the subject o f the origin of
creativity, but, at the same time, he did expect that we would see a link
between creativity and certain ways of interacting with the world:
It is not of course that anyone will ever be able to explain
the creative impulse, and it is unlikely that anyone would
ever want to do so; but the link can be made, and usefully
made, between creative living and living itself, and the
reasons can be studied why it is that creative living can
be lost and why the individual’s feeling that life is real or
meaningful can disappear. (69)
Winnicott proposes that one place we can find creativity is in the encounter
between psychoanalyst and patient. This situation provides an example of a
“potential space” wherein the patient is encouraged, in the presence of
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another, to play. Psychotherapy, he suggests, is meant “to afford
opportunity for formless experience, and for creative impulses, motor and
sensory, which are the stuff o f playing”; he goes on to reflect upon our need
for a sense of play, an awareness of the give and take between ourselves and
the world:
And on the basis of playing is built the whole o f man’s
experiential existence. No longer are we either introvert or
extrovert. We experience life in the area of transitional
phenomena, in the exciting interweave o f subjectivity and
objective observation, and in an area that is intermediate
between the inner reality of the individual and the shared
reality of the world that is external to individuals. (64)
Like psychotherapy, travel writing—at least that which attempts to be
somewhat introspective—places the boundary between self and other to the
forefront of our experience. Annie Dillard, in her autobiography, An
American Childhood, makes just such a connection when she describes her
life as a child, drawing upon the figure of the oceanic explorer: “I loved
living at my own edge, as an explorer on a ship presses to the ocean’s rim;
mind and skin were one joined force curved out and alert, prow and
telescope. I pitched, as I did most things, in a rapture” (97). I will suggest
that what Winnicott refers to as the processes of creative living are reflected
in the processes of travel and travel writing.
One aspect of creative living is the ability to discover and inhabit a
“potential space,” a place marked by a feeling of liberation and
self-determination, an anti-dote to habit and despair. In our lives we have
the dangerous tendency to have our experiences interpreted for us through
the various media, by the so-called experts, or we take on the values of the
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crowd, and this can lead to feeling that life is empty, that we are, in a sense,
living a lie. Those in academia, Winnicott suggests, are particularly
susceptible to the intellectual false self:
The world may observe academic success of a high
degree, and may find it hard to believe in the very real
distress of the individual concerned, who feels “phoney”
the more he or she is successful. When such individuals
destroy themselves in one way or another, instead of
fulfilling promise, this invariably produces a sense o f
shock in those who have developed high hopes of the
individual. (“Ego Distortion” 144)
“Potential space” is the area in which individuals feel free to create their
own connections, thereby liberating themselves from the second-hand
conclusions of others. Robert Rogers, in Self and Other: Object Relations in
Psychoanalysis and Literature, helps define “potential space” when he
writes about the sequestration of Emily Dickinson. He suggests that by
shutting herself off, at times, from impinging society Dickinson found the
space she needed for creativity:
We need to understand that sequestration is a means to
the end of enabling her to compose poetry (essentially an
individual task as distinguished from an emotionally
isolated one). It provides her with a tranquil ‘potential
space’ where she can make contacts with those aspects of
her self and her relationships with important others by no
means readily negotiated, at least by her, in ordinary
social space. (151)
On the surface such an insight seems trite; of course a writer needs space—a
room of her own—to write. But Winnicott’s contribution comes through
considering the quality of that space. Why is it that some encounters with
solitude lead to terror, some to art?
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The significant quality that makes “potential space” possible is that
one is alone in the presence of another, that there is some kind of presence
that makes one relaxed enough to create. Winnicott describes this as a
“holding environment” and he explains that
. . . it is important that there is something available,
someone present, although present without making
demands; the impulse having arrived, the id experience
can be fruitful, and the object (recipient of the impulse)
can be a part or whole of the attendant person, namely the
mother. It is only under these conditions that the infant
can have an experience which feels real. A large number
of such experiences forms the basis for a life that has
reality instead of futility. The individual who has
developed the capacity to be alone is constantly able to
rediscover the personal impulse, and the personal impulse
is not wasted because the state of being alone is
something which(though paradoxically) always implies
that someone else is there. (“Capacity” 34)
When Winnicott writes about someone being present he is referring to the
mother who is present in room while the child plays, but this insight seems
relevant to travel writing as well. Separation is, of course, an integral aspect
of travel; one leaves one’s family or one’s homeland for new surroundings.
But the most fruitful travels are often those in which one feels that
separation within a context that is new but not threatening. For example,
readers are frequently surprised that Thoreau’s reclusion to Walden Pond
took place within walking distance to his mother’s house. And as we will
see with James, although he makes travel his life and, to a great degree, his
livelihood, he expresses no desire to travel to the antipodes, to see China or
India, or to explore the Congo; James wants to travel in Europe, a place in
which he could feel liberated and different while still feeling, to some
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extent, “at home,” because his earliest travels to Europe were with his
family.
When one’s environment is secure enough, separation from the
mother leads to the creation of “transitional objects” that constitute magical
connections to the world; in this way a blanket, for instance, becomes
imbued with comforting qualities. When traveling, a mother doesn’t forget
that blanket because it is through that transitional object that the child
maintains his or her sense of security. I will argue that travel writing tries to
emulate this magical connection, making it a “transitional object” for the
adult as the writer risks the connections that tie together the self with the
not-self. Winnicott suggests that the need for “play” begins in childhood
and continues through adulthood where it becomes associated with certain
types of activities: “no human being is free from the strain of relating inner
and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an
intermediate area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion,
etc.)” (13). These activities represent metaphorical expressions of the self.
James Olney, in Metaphors of Self touches upon this same idea when he
writes about the role of metaphor in self-discovery. He suggests that the
“self,” while not being approachable by any direct method, is experienced
by us through metaphor:
A metaphor, then, through which we stamp our own
image on the face of nature, allows us to connect the
known of ourselves to the unknown of the world, and,
making available new relational patterns, it
simultaneously organizes the self into a new and richer
entity; so that the old known self is joined to and
transformed into the new and heretofore unknown, self.
Metaphor says very little about what I am, or am like, and
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about what I am becoming; and in the end it connects me
more nearly with the deep reaches of myself than with an
objective universe. (32)
In other words, we can only feel connected with who we are by indirect
means, by a metaphor. Travel writing is a particularly effective method of
self-discovery because the traveler is constantly engaged in the process of
reconciling inner and outer worlds; the traveler is enacting, by physically
going outward and mentally turning inward, what Olney calls the double
metaphor by which one not only becomes engaged with the world but that
engagement turns back upon itself offering the individual insight into the
self.
Travel writers show us various levels of self-awareness and much of
that has to do with the level of comfort they find in strange surroundings.
Benjamin Franklin represents one who is extremely at home in traveling; it
is hard, perhaps impossible, to shake his confidence in himself. In contrast,
to mix historical and fictional figures, we might consider Conrad’s
Marlowe; traveling down the Congo, in search of Mr. Kurtz, he experiences
horror, resisting the connections between himself and his environment. In
the middle of these two extremes we can place Henry James. On the one
hand he avoids the horror o f Marlowe by traveling in a somewhat familiar
place, yet he never attains the comfort of Franklin who spent his travels
being catered to by diplomats and kings. James’s economic and emotional
situation was precarious enough that he felt the need to try and forge the
connections between himself and his environment while, at the same time,
displaying more sensitivity to inner states than Franklin would, or could,
allow.
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James’s writings provide a good example of Winnicott’s theory
because James strives to relate inner and outer worlds not only in his travel
writing but also in his fiction. He is at once tethered to real objective
experience; he is, in a sense, a reporter with a responsibility to the truth, but
he is also a creative artist owing allegiance to psychic truth. James, in
Winnicott’s parlance, crosses over the line of object-relating—seeing
objects as projections of inner states—into object usage wherein one tries to
deal with the world as a shared reality. Winnicott writes that in object usage
“there is no escape: the analyst must take into account the nature of the
object, not as a projection, but as a thing in itself. . . . relating can be
described in terms o f the individual subject, and that usage cannot be
described except in terms of acceptance of the object’s independent
existence, its property of having been there all the time”(88). I believe
James shows a commitment to reality and that his travels are a sign of that
commitment; he doesn’t travel to escape. While Winnicott suggested earlier
that playing, creating connections between oneself and one’s environment,
is an important aspect of mental health, he points to the seemingly opposite
pole, partaking of a shared reality, as also being an integral part of
psychological health and maturation:
To use an object the subject must have developed a
capacity to use objects. This is part of the change to the
reality principle. This capacity cannot be said to be
inborn, nor can its development in an individual be taken
for granted. The development of a capacity to use an
object is another example of the maturational process as
something that depends on a facilitating environment. (89)
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Travel invokes this, as Winnicott terms it, “paradox” o f potential space; in
travel our existence as unique selves partaking of shared reality is fronted
and we have an acute opportunity for insight into that fact
Winnicott’s theories go a long way towards explaining James’s
experience of travel, towards answering the questions o f why he feels more
comfortable abroad than at home, and how it is that through the experience
of traveling he discovers his creative power. In the following chapters I will
deal with James’s discovery of his creative ability through travel and will
attempt to show why James finds his art in Europe. I will also examine
James’s residency in Europe suggesting that his traveling provides him with
a new kind of familial relations in which he can continuously recur to the
potential spaces that make his art possible. And I will also deal with
James’s return to America, documented in The American Scene: this book
offers particularly sharp insight into the creation of potential spaces, on the
attempt and failure to magically link the observer and the observed.
Throughout the subsequent examination of Henry James’s travels and travel
related writings I will show that there are strong parallels between what
Winnicott describes as creative living and the processes involved in travel
and travel writing.
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Notes
1 See Roberts; Hopkins; and Turner.
2 See Willbem; and Rogers 159-181.
3 The most thorough account of this is in Greenberg and Mitchell. See
also Ogden; and Mitchell.
4 See Olney; Kerby; Eakin; Smith; and Johnson.
5 For reflections on these attacks see Habermas; Lyotard; and Jameson.
6 For examples see Said; Pratt; Greenfield; Blunt includes a useful
overview of these ideas.
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Chapter Two
“Dawdling and Gaping”:
Understanding James’s Peripatetic Youth
I was never so happy at home as away from it.
Henry James, Sr.
We were for considerable periods, during
our earliest time, nothing less than hotel
children.
Henry James
Travel is a privileged form of escape. Travel brochures contrast
images of arterial-clogged freeways with pictures of near-deserted Mexican
beaches, leading to the inevitable conclusion that drinking on the beach has a
more persuasive appeal when we contrast it to the anxiety of our daily lives.
In literature, we encounter many examples of characters who, feeling the
pressure of expectations from their family and peers, hope that escaping to
some place far, far away will liberate the self, allowing for a revision of their
self-conceptions. While it may seem that James is one who runs away to
Europe (he spent over twenty years there without returning to America), to
stop there would be to misunderstand his relationship to travel. While
James’s travels were undoubtedly, at least in part, a push towards
independence, in order to fully understand James, we need to also recognize
the role travel played as part of his familial culture. For James does not run
away from America so much as he runs towards Europe, often expressing his
expatriation not as a break from the past, but rather as an acceptance of his
birthright and an initiation into a holy mystery.
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This “initiation,” as James calls his exposure to Europe, is best exam
ined in the first of his autobiographies, A Small Bov and Others (1913), which
is a wonderful reflection on the artist as a young man. In this memoir, James
presents his induction into European culture as a bildunesroman that unfolds
in two parts: first, his preparations for understanding Europe and then, his re
encounter with Europe, in 1855, at the age of twelve. James did not view
Europe as an escape, and yet, paradoxically, James did see it as a way to
create a private space for himself. In examining his autobiographical writing,
we will see that Europe gave James a potential space that encouraged
creativity and self-fulfillment. This potential space was his alone, and yet the
quality of that space was such that James enjoyed the feeling of both sep
aration from, and connection to, his family and his personal past.
1
Henry James was bom into a restless family, and that restlessness
began with his father, a man that on the surface had more than enough reasons
to stay at home. William James, Henry James’s grandfather, immigrated from
Ireland (sometime between 1789 and 1794)1 and became one of the richest
men in Albany, as well as a key figure in the building of the Erie Canal. Such
propitious beginnings opened the door for Henry James Sr., his first child to
survive infancy, to either follow in the family business or to enter the field of
politics. For many, the opportunity to perpetuate one’s father’s successful
business would have provided reason enough to stay in Albany, but that was
not so for Henry Sr. Nor was he anchored to Albany by an even more
compelling reason: as the result of a fire and consequent gangrene he had had
his right leg amputated. In the days before “handicapped access,” his
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condition made travel uncomfortable at its best as he undoubtedly walked
uneven sidewalks and strove to keep his balance on boats pitching upon the
seas. Yet, despite these considerations, Henry James Sr. defined himself and
his family as travelers as he moved them from New York to Rhode Island and
repeatedly to Europe, often using the children’s education as an excuse for the
family’s inability to stay put.
Henry James Sr.’s attitudes towards the world at large, specifically the
notion that self-consciousness begins away from the home, are reflected in an
unfinished fragment of autobiography which is published in The Literary
Remains of the Late Henry James, collected by William James.2 Henry James
Sr. begins the autobiography by reflecting on his earliest memory: “the
earliest event of my biographic consciousness is that o f my having been
carried out into the streets one night, in the arms of my Negro nurse, to
witness a grand illumination in honor of the treaty of peace then just signed
with Great Britain” (145). This first memory, like many of our early
memories, might have been built up through the memories of others, but it is
nevertheless significant because Henry Sr. chooses to promote this particular
event as his first memory. A most striking aspect of this image is the absense
of the family: his recollection is neither an affectionate scene with mother or
father nor is it a household event. Rather it is a public spectacle in the streets
of Albany that takes him away from the family; as Henry reinforces, his
“earliest self-recognition” begins with a “municipal illumination” (145).
Alfred Habegger, in The Father: A Life of Henry James. Sr.. suggests
Henry Sr. defined himself as a traveler who could only gain a sense o f himself
outside the home, away from the strong presence of his father. In accordance
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with this interpretation, Habegger offers a reading of Henry Sr.’s first memory
which stresses the exhilaration and freedom that comes from leaving the
home: “The fun to be had elsewhere is a theme that appears even in his very
first memory” (55). And yet, there is much more to James’s account. While
Henry Sr. does describe the delight of escaping the home, especially when
recollecting his boyhood jaunts into the countryside, this recollection of
infancy confides a deep fear of the unknown, a terror of the dark. The
description of his first recollection continues: “the only impression left by the
illumination upon my imagination was the contrast of the awful dark of the
sky with the feeble glitter o f the streets; as if the animus of the display had
been, not to eclipse the darkness, but to make it visible” (145-46). As James
leaves home, goes into the streets, and becomes self-conscious, he also
suggestively enters the hell o f Milton’s Paradise Lost:
No light, but rather darkness visible Serv’d only to
discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful
shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope
never comes That comes to all. (Book 1,64-68)
Like Satan, Henry Sr. is left in a world of chronic dissatisfaction, a world
marked by freedom of choice and the overwhelming burden that freedom
entails. This first memory represents the death of James’s innocence as he
ventures out and into a world that is, at best, only feebly lit. In this reflection
Henry Sr. exposes an attitude towards traveling. On the one hand, memory
begins when he leaves the household; he does not claim to remember anything
prior to being in the street, which implies that one must leave home to become
self-conscious. But, while consciousness has its usefulness, it also illuminates
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a lack of security as one has to trespass upon the uncertain terrain of a hostile
world.
As a consequence of Heray Sr.’s views, “home” and “abroad” became
charged subjects in the James household. Despite their many journeys, one
can say that the James family never fully embraced their traveling life. All of
their travels become colored by the surplus o f explanations they used to
justify them. We can see that Henry James must have felt that there was
something desperate, or at least confusing, in his family’s travel because in
Notes of a Son and a Brother (1914) he does not even mention that the
family’s European odyssey from 1855-1860 was interrupted by a trip back to
America (1858-1859). Instead, he collates the trips to Europe and America,
making them seem less fragmented. Habegger remarks on the James family’s
need to defend their flightiness: “various considerations were brought forward
to justify the new move, the father admitting that the family’s stay in Europe
had been determined chiefly by the ‘imagined needs’ of William’s education,
and that it could do no harm to jerk the other children back to America”
(416). Years later, when education was no longer the pressing concern, Alice
and William would use failing health as justification for journeys abroad. The
James family’s various migrations express an uneasy relationship to travel, a
relationship that is expressed in Heniy Sr.’s first memory which
communicates both a fear of and a fascination with living a public life.
I begin with Henry Sr.’s earliest recollection because it bears striking
resemblance to that of the younger Henry James who, in A Small Bov and
Others, finds occasion to remark upon his own first memory. James recalls
his early stirrings of consciousness with an intriguing narrative form; be-
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ginning with a seemingly arbitrary memory that provides an opening to the
past, he wanders the dark comers of his mind, guided by whatever points of
illumination he can find, finally excavating his earliest memories. James
begins with the memory o f his uncle, Captain Robert Temple, on his way to
the Mexican War when James was about five years old; but this memory,
what James calls his “earliest glimpse of any circumstance of the public
order,” gives way to a stronger recollection of his uncles Gus and John James
delivering the news that “the Revolution had triumphed in Paris and Louis
Philippe had fled to England.” The uncles delivered this news in the James
family’s Fifth Avenue residence, a house that was subsequently “swallowed
up in the present Brevoort Hotel.” This architectural point parallels the way
Henry James’s earlier memories are swallowed up, yet somehow still present,
in subsequent events. And it is this latter recollection, this memory of the
flight of the king, that leads James into the use of the royal “we” as he
uncovers his earliest memory: “We had somehow waked early to a perception
of Paris, and a vibration of my very most infantile sensibility under its sky had
by the same stroke got itself reserved for subsequent wondering reference.”
James continues:
I had been there for a short time in the second year of my
life, and I was to communicate to my parents later on that
as a baby in long clothes, seated opposite to them in a
carriage and on the lap of another person, I had been
impressed with the view, framed by the clear window of
the vehicle as we passed, of a great stately square
surrounded with high-roofed houses and having in its
centre a tall and glorious column. . . while I waggled my
small feet, as I definitely remember doing, under my
flowing robe, I had crossed the Rue de Castiglione and
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taken in, for all my time, the admirable aspect of the
Place and the Colonne Vendome.” (33)
James’s memory o f Paris might also be called a “municipal illumination,”
taking place in a public space, and this event is as meaningful to the younger
James as going into the streets of Albany was for his father. The meaning, for
James, is that the seed of consciousness had been planted, significantly, in the
soil of Europe, and therefore all memory is affected by the dispersion of that
seed. Because he “awoke” in Paris, Paris becomes a sticking point in his
mind that attracts and gathers subsequent memories concerning Europe. The
King flees Paris but, at the same time, James arrives, and in this
autobiographical moment the political figure is replaced by the artist. While
some moments are fleeting, this stirring of consciousness becomes the magnet
that attracts moments that make up the self.
As we can see from this anecdote, James is drawn towards the old
world, but, as we learn from his autobiographies, this attraction is made
greater by the need to escape what might be referred to as the personal “old
world,” the sometimes stifling influence of his family. Habegger, focusing on
Henry James Sr., recognized the younger James’s need to escape, suggesting
he had to find “an alternative to the incoherence and depression visited on
him by his father” (318). One can see that much o f what James does serves to
separate himself from the rest of the family. One example is evident in the
genesis of A Small Bov and Others which was begun when Mrs. William
James requested a collection o f letters and a brief memoir of her departed
husband. What James writes is more properly described as a portrait of the
artist—Henry James—as a young man and William is, at best, a minor
character in this development. James recognized this failure and the next year
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began Notes of a Son and a Brother which does include more traditional
biographical material of both William and his father, and yet it also ends up
focused on the development of the artist For instance, when James relates
William’s struggle with the desire to paint in the midst o f his father’s
disapproval of such a vocation, James interprets that struggle through his own
troubles in becoming an artist and again ends up more focused
autobiographically than biographically.
While discussing Henry Sr.’s opposition to his pursuing an artistic ca
reer James confides that his father’s typical response was that choosing a field
entailed too much of a narrowing of the self. James writes: “When I myself,
later on, began to ‘write’ it was breathed upon me with the finest bewildering
eloquence, with a power of suggestion in truth which I fairly now count it a
gain to have felt play over me, that this too was narrowing.” James, ap
parently, is presenting his father as broad in his aspirations for his sons, but
lest we miss his point, which is impressively subtle, James reminds us that he
is presenting a “high paradox.” While Henry Sr., on the one hand rejects what
is “narrowing,” with his “power of suggestion” he proves himself to be a
masterful agent of the narrow way. James follows this example with a letter
written to Henry T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, in which Henry Sr.
apologizes for his excessive zeal in speaking of Henry Jr.. In that letter, he
writes: “I don’t know how it is with better men, but the parental sentiment is
so fiendish a thing with me that if anyone attempt to slay my young, especially
in a clandestine way, or out of a pious regard to the welfare of the souls
comprised in the diocese o f the Atlantic, I can’t help devoting him bag and
baggage to the infernal gods” (269). In presenting a quotation from this letter,
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James shows us the volatile and overprotecting presence of his father and yet
his conclusion is characteristically understated: “The few lines make for me,
after all the years, a sort of silver key, so exquisitely fitting, to the treasure of
living intercourse, of a domestic air quickened and infinitely coloured,
comprised in all our younger time” (270). James is reluctant to criticize his
father except in the most subtle ways. His father’s letter becomes a silver key
and James takes what might be perceived as his father’s meddling in his af
fairs and creates, instead, the picture of a stimulating interaction between
father and sons. Looking back he can see the fertility of this relationship, and
yet, growing up such overbearing parentage led James into conjuring
imaginative escapes from his family.
Part of the imaginative landscape that James inhabited while growing
up was created with fantasies of the lives led by orphans, and it is not surpris
ing that James’s first novel, Watch and Ward, is about an orphaned girl. To
James, orphans had the supreme power of creativity. One opportunity for one
of his many rhapsodies on the envied lives o f orphans arises when James
speaks of his cousins, the Temple orphans, who visited during holidays in
New York. James envied their being “so little fathered or mothered, so little
sunk in the short range, that the romance o f life seemed to lie in some
constant improvisation, by vague over hovering authorities, of new situations
and horizons.” Instead of pitying their loss, James recognizes their chance for
self-creation and he admits he wished for the opportunity to be homesick, “a
luxury of which I was unnaturally, or at least prosaically, deprived” (11).
James comes back to this point again when visited by another orphaned
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cousin: Albert. Referring to this occasion, James ponders his fascination with
orphans:
. . . and if it was my habit, as I have hinted, to attribute to
orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a setting
necessarily more delightful than our father’d and mother’d
one, so there spread about this appointed comrade, the
perfection of the type, inasmuch as he alone was neither
brother’d nor sister’d, an air of possibilities that were none
the less vivid for being quite indefinite. (70)
Albert, in contrast to the Temple clan, was a sort o f “super-orphan” because
he not only lacked parents but siblings as well. Ironically, it is James, so
much mothered and fathered, as well as sistered and brothered, who becomes
the talented novelist. Perhaps an imaginary deprivation creates a better space
for creativity than the real thing.
Travel, for James, becomes a logical extension of this intrigue with or
phanhood. As James writes, orphans had not only the distinction of being
alone, but also of being homeless and he envied them their opportunity for
being homesick. James, coming from a healthy home—two parents and a
father that did not go to an office—found his own home a little too healthy; he
suggests that perhaps a life of deprivation would be, if not enjoyable, at least
more romantic than his own life. Lacking that practical deprivation James
creates his own space for self-development through his imaginings of his
orphaned cousins and through his perceptions of Europe which often figures
in these autobiographies as a playground, a space where James learned the
power of creativity. One example of this creation o f imaginative space is
introduced in the figure of a boy James knew in New York, Louis De Coppet,
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who “though theoretically American and domiciled, was naturally French, and
so pressed further home to me that ‘sense o f Europe’ to which I feel that my
very earliest consciousness waked.” In the presence of this playmate James
experiences his first impression that travel— in the figure of this boy—and
creativity—in the form of literature—bore some type of relation. He writes of
De Coppet:
He opened vistas, and I count ever as precious anyone,
everyone, who betimes does that for the small straining
vision; performing this office never so much, doubtless, as
when, during that summer, he invited me to collaborate
with him in the production o f a romance which il se fit
fort to get printed, to get published, when success, or in
other words completion, should crown our effort. . . I
think of my participation in this vain dream as of the very
first gage of visiting approval offered to the exercise of a
gift. (22)
Although their meeting takes place in New York, engaging on this project
with De Coppet is described as a foreign affair. Not only does this playmate
represent the old world, but he also represents a new world, for James, o f
“visiting approval offered to the exercise o f a gift.” One senses that parental
approval for his literary talents was not tangible to the young James; on his
being sent to a scientific school in Switzerland, years later, James suggests, “I
puzzle it out to-day that my parents had simply said to themselves, in serious
concern, that I read too many novels, or at least read them too attentively”
(Notes 241). Louis De Coppet offered James a different way of seeing
himself. In James’s words, he gave
the most personal, tap to that pointed prefigurement of
the manners o f ‘Europe,’ which, inserted wedge-like, if
not to say peg-like, into my young allegiance, was to split
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the tender organ into such equal halves. His the toy
hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail. . .
It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath,
however scant, o f another world. (22)
James creates a wonderfidly violent, yet essentially playful, image. He brings
us back to the idea that “Europe” had been inserted into his consciousness
from his earliest memory, and suggests that Louis drives the nail deeper. But
this violent act is not followed by death or schizophrenia because this image is
playful; what comes through this violent split of consciousness is a sense of
wonder at newly discovered possibilities. Through De Coppet, James travels
in a potential space where he can discover new talents that lay untapped; that
is, until someone helps create the environment in which James can tap into
them. In the last sentence of this quotation we find James countering any
lingering violence in the imagery. James transforms the image from hammers
and nails to that of breathing as he describes Louis’ influence with the phrase:
“the mild magic in that breath.” This is not the “power of suggestion”
breathed upon the young James by his father that I referred to earlier; this
breath is notably mild. As the hammer suggests a symbolic death, the breath
symbolically revives, or more suggestively, inspires, James.
James is similarly inspired when he is visited by his “young cousin
Marie, youngest daughter o f the house, exactly of my own age, and named in
honour of her having been bom in Paris” (106). Like De Coppet, Marie has
the proper resume to inspire James. In contrast, her sisters do not enter
James’s narrative except as being noted for being so much less interesting for
not being bom in Paris. And as in the example with De Coppet, Marie
teaches James about creativity. Yet this example is also quite different.
James does not go into literary collaboration with Marie; he learns his lesson
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by watching her interaction with her mother when she refuses to go to bed.
Marie’s mother implores her: “Come now, my dear, don’t make a scene—I
insist on your not making a scene!” This expression is all James needs to
enter into another magical moment in which he recognizes the possibilities of
self-determination.
That was all the witchcraft the occasion used, but the note
was none the less epoch-making. The expression, so
vivid, so portentous, was one I had never heard—it had
never been addressed to us at home; and who should say
now what a world one mightn’t at once read into it? It
seemed freighted to sail so far; it told me much about life.
Life at these intensities clearly became ‘scenes’; but the
great thing, the immense illumination, was that we could
make them or not as we chose . . . The mark had been
made for me and the door flung open; the passage,
gathering up aU the elements of the troubled time, had
been itself a scene, quite enough o f one, and I had become
aware with it of a rich accession o f possibilities. (107)
Once again James describes his creative epiphany as a foreign experience, an
expression never “addressed to us at home,” an expression “freighted to sail
so far.” And again, he takes the domestic and makes it historic; just as the
king’s fleeing Paris translates into James’s arrival, here the seemingly
trivial—a tantrum over going to bed—is made monumental in the investi
gation of the growth of self-consciousness. In this “spoiled” girl’s putting off
going to bed, James enters a previously unimagined world of possibilities and
lays claim to the throne of self-determination.
2
Among his cousins and others, James discovered a strategy for open
ing the door to creativity and that strategy entailed two polar experiences,
which, keeping with the metaphor of the door, we might refer to as “coming
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in” and “going out” Creativity, James finds, is not only fostered in the act of
escape, of going out the door, but also in the act o f discovery, of coming into,
or more accurately, being initiated in, something new. On the one hand,
James requires some type o f familial depravation; we see this in his
imaginings about the lives o f his orphaned cousins. He expresses the need to
escape his family in order to engage the alchemy of creation. But just as
important, James needs to fill that space and he fills it through travel;
borrowing the phrase from William Blake, travel, for James, is the key to the
“doors of perception.” The orphaned cousins speak to the need for open
ended possibilities, but the story is not complete until the frenchified cousin
Marie and Louis De Coppet are able to cap those open ends with evocative
self-determined scenes. And while James is only, at best, a vicarious orphan,
he is, like Marie and De Coppet, a real traveler who spent his peripatetic
youth traveling between the United States and Europe.
Despite James’s protests about being too much mothered and fathered,
he did have a remarkable amount of liberty in his young days. Whether he
was playing in the streets o f New York or visiting the Louvre with brother
William, James, like his father, “never felt so happy at home as away from it”
(Literary 188). In A Small Bov and Others James comments upon his early
freedom, writing that he is led to “wonder at the liberty of range and op
portunity of adventure allowed to my tender age; though the puzzle may veiy
well drop, after all, as I ruefully reflect that I couldn’t have been judged at
home reckless or adventurous” (16). He recognizes the disparity of his
positions at home and abroad. While recognizing the possibilities for
adventure away from home, he undercuts his point in his admission that by
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the standards of the home he was anything but adventurous. He is never
allowed to run into grave danger; as Habegger suggests, “one reason Henry
James represented his native land as homogeneous and boring was that he had
been shielded from its ranker extremes” (309). And perhaps his father, burned
while playing a game in which one tried to dodge a fire-ball, did try to shield
the younger Henry James from danger. But the salient point is that James is
given enough liberty to feel the possibility of adventure and for someone as
perceptive as James, the possibility, however slight, was everything.
After returning from Europe in 1845, at the age of two, the James
family lived in Albany and at his grandmother’s house in Washington Square
before settling, in 1848 and for the next seven years, on Fourteenth Street in
New York. While in New York, James began to cultivate his appreciation for
creative spaces which would reach even fuller bloom when he returned to
Europe. One such creative space, one of James’s fascinations while living on
Fourteenth Street, was “the countryplace . . . on the northeast comer of
Eighteenth Street. . . a big brown house in ‘grounds’ peopled with animal
life” (A Small 16). And a large part of his fascination rests in the idea that he
was exploring, albeit in a limited way, on his own. James writes: “I see
myself moreover as somehow always alone in these and like New York
flaneries and contemplations, and feel how the sense o f my being so, being at
any rate master of my short steps, such as they were, through all the beguiling
streets, was probably the very savour of each of my chance feasts” (16).
James, apparently, was not actually alone, because he acknowledges only the
sense of being so. In Winnicott’s terms, James is “playing in the presence of
his mother”; he is given the kind of protective space one needs to be creative.
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A few lines later, James presents a wonderfully evocative reflection on seeing,
from his perspective in 1915, his whole life played out his visits to Eighteenth
Street:
For there was the very pattern and measure of all he was
to demand: just to be somewhere—almost anywhere
would do—and somehow receive an impression or an
accession, feel a relation or a vibration. He was to go
without many things, ever so many—as all persons do in
whom contemplation takes so much the place of action;
but everywhere, in the years that came soon after, and
that in fact continued long, in the streets of great towns,
in New York still for some time, and then for a while in
London, in Paris, in Geneva, wherever it might be, he was
to enjoy more than anything the so far from showy prac
tice of wondering and dawdling and gaping: he was
really, I think, much to profit by it. (17)
In his jaunts around New York James learned his strategy for creativity,
recognizing that instead of actively participating in the scene he would be
better served to use his powers of absorption, the “practice of wondering and
dawdling and gaping.” But what is remarkable is that while James claims that
“almost anywhere would do,” he does not seem to consider his home and
family as offering suitable opportunities for this practice. One comes to this
conclusion not only because James’s autobiographies, in a large part the story
of his creative development, rarely mention any particularly domestic scenes,
but also because the previous passage tells us this practice took place in “the
streets of great towns, in New York still for some time, and then for a while in
London, in Paris, in Geneva.” Like his father, Henry James’s initiation into a
perceptive and conscious life takes place in the street, in a public forum where
the individual can escape recognition and can “dawdle and gape” with
immunity.
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Henry James presents the history of his youth, therefore, not so much
one o f doing as one of storing and gestating experiences. James refers to this
process as “dawdling and gaping” and, in A Small Bov and Others, these
become portmanteau terms by which James organizes his notions about how
creativity is engaged. The James family during those New York years
typically retreated to seaside resorts to escape the heat of summer and James
admits that although there was something dubious in being “nothing less than
hotel children,” he relished the opportunity to leave the house and practice his
powers of observation. He writes:
We were private enough in all conscience, I think I must
have felt, the rest of the year; and at what age mustn’t I
quite have succumbed to the charm of the world seen in a
larger way? For there, incomparably, was the chance to
dawdle and gape; there were human appearances in end
less variety and on the exhibition-stage of a piazza that
my gape measured almost as by miles; it was even as if I
had become positively conscious that the social scene so
peopled would pretty well always say more to me than
anything else. (19-20)
Again, James makes the point that home is the place he was confined to “the
rest of the year” and only through travel does the world open up for him and
engage the engines of creativity. In both of the previous examples James uses
the terms “dawdle and gape” to suggest his responsiveness to an active and
changing world but he also goes on to use this phrase in a different context
that strengthens the identification of travel with creativity. To begin the third
chapter he writes, “But I positively dawdle and gape here—I catch myself in
the act” (17). In this instance, James is not referring to an act of the past, but
rather to his present writing of the autobiography. So intertwined is the story
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of James’s travels and his burgeoning creativity that he can easily take the
terms of his responsiveness while traveling and direct them to the
remembrance of his life; travel and autobiography are, in some ways, related
experiences.
The New York years finally came to an end ini 855 when the James
family journeyed to Europe to avoid the inevitable corruption Henry Sr.
believed they faced by staying in wild New York. Habegger tells us, “Since
1849, when James worried about the ‘shocking bad-manners’ his boys were
picking up in New York, he had been talking about getting an Old World
education for them” (362). This move was years in coming and in Habegger’s
estimation it became a defining moment for the James children:
Henry Sr.’s children’s lives were cut in two by this
journey to the Old World, just as his own childhood had
once been severed. Now they, too, were detached from
their experience, forced to stand to one side of the lives
they had taken for granted. O f course, their break was a
good deal less traumatic than his had been. They didn’t
lose a leg, and whereas he had been kept home for a
period o f years, they were given an unparalleled
opportunity to escape the confines of a provincial world.
Still, it was a kind of death and not without pain. If
things worked out, the children would be forced to
reinvent themselves, as their father had, and thus achieve
a degree of mastery over their native endowment. (364)
Habegger presents a strikingly violent image, suggesting that leaving New
York was, if not a physical, at least a psychological amputation. This is an
intriguing image because it cuts through the interpretation of the move that
Henry James’s offers in his first autobiography. James’s autobiographies rest
upon an assumption that he was meant for Europe and therefore one gets the
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impression from these accounts that, while this trip to Europe was a defining
moment, it was not abrupt or life-threatening.
Throughout A Small Bov and Others. James suggests he came to
Europe ready to fall in love. For instance, he intimates his indoctrination into
the wonders of Europe when, while still in New York, he visited P. T.
Bamum’s “lecture-room” as well as another attraction, the “Crystal Palace,”
in which he felt he “was somehow in Europe, since everything about me had
been ‘brought over.”’ James is particularly enthralled by “Thorwaldsen’s
enormous Christ and the Disciples, a shining marble company ranged in a
semicircle of dark maroon walls.” He writes:
If this was Europe then Europe was beautiful indeed, and
we rose to it on the wings o f wonder. . . The Crystal
Palace was vast and various and dense, which was what
Europe was going to be; it was a deep-down jungle of im
pressions that were somehow challenges, even as we
might, helplessly defied, find foreign words and practices
. . . so that I felt the journey back in the autumn dusk and
the Sixth Avenue cars (established just in time) a relapse
into soothing flatness, a return to the Fourteenth Street
horizon from a far journey and a hundred looming
questions that would still, tremendous thought, come up
for all the personal answers of which one cultivated the
seed. (98-9)
James is deeply impressed by the image confronting him and he confesses his
predisposition towards appreciating Europe. Leaving for Europe was not, as
Habegger writes, “a kind of death”; death already lay in the “soothing
flatness” of his home. The “Fourteenth Street horizon” represents a limit
upon his perception while Europe stands in for a whole different level of
experience: “a deep-down jungle o f impressions.” Europe is the challenge
that will allow him to grow. For Henry Sr., travel represents an escape from
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the deplorable social conditions of nineteenth century America, but for the
younger James, travel represents self-fulfillment, a way to pose questions
whose answers depend largely upon the creative vision of the writer. Europe,
at least in the imagination of Henry James, offers the space, or in his words
the “questions,” which cause creativity to ferment. New York then takes on
the representation of personal confinement while Europe promises an
expansion of the self; the positing of questions demands “personal answers of
which one cultivated the seed.”
3
For James, Europe provided a focal point for the imagination. In the
memories of his early exposure to travel, even before his family’s 1855
European journey, he is faced with an overabundance o f images: traveling
uncles, aunts, friends of the family and the many letters received from abroad
(A Small 155-6). In recalling these diverse recollections, James’s fertile
imagination threatens to arrest the movement of his narrative and he finds he
has to censor himself: “I confess myself embarrassed by my very ease of re
capture of my young consciousness; so that I perforce try to encourage lapses
and keep my abundance down. The place for the lapse consents with
difficulty, however, to be any particular point of the past at which I catch
myself (easily caught as I am) looking about me” (156). James’s narrative
becomes bogged down in New York as he recalls the various psychological
preparations for the most significant transition of his narrative, the transition
to Europe, but, happily, James discovers the way to convey his narrative when
he seemingly stumbles upon this image of “looking about.” As soon as James
latches upon the image of physically examining his memories, a transition is
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made to an image of himself looking about from the top of a London carriage
“one June afternoon of 1855” (157). The transportation from America to
England originally took place on a steamship called the Atlantic; but this
autobiographical transportation conveys the reader via James’s memories as
he equates his observation amidst his store o f images with the eager eye of a
traveler. Once again James compares travel with the writing o f autobiography
because, while one needs steamships to travel, one must also recognize that it
is only through the imagination that one completes the transition to Europe.
The description of the ride atop the carriage continues and James
reflects on his fortune at attaining that precious vantage,
I was an item in the overflow of a vehicle completely
occupied, and I thrilled with the spectacle my seat beside
the coachman so amply commanded—without knowing
at this moment why, amid other claims, I had been
marked for such an eminence. I so far justify my
privilege at least as still to feel that prime impression, o f
extreme intensity, underlie, deep down, the whole mass
of later observation. There are London aspects which, so
far as they still touch me, after all the years, touch me as
just sensible reminders of this hour of early apprehension,
so penetrated for me as to have kept its ineffaceable
stamp. (157)
The James family’s arrival in England coincides with the arrival o f the true
and lasting Henry James; he presents this carriage ride as though he has
ascended the throne: indeed, he was “marked for such an eminence.” While
James found that he could censor the intimations of European travels, he
could not censor this memory. In comparing the two images of “looking
about” James concludes that, in terms of his ability to pick and choose and
“encourage lapses,” they had “nothing in common” (157). When James
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considers the question of his psychological preparation—why is it that Europe
struck James with such depth and force?—he concedes it is open to various
interpretations. But the second image, created through the physical act of
traveling, represents London as fact, as “that prime impression” that offers
unambiguous self-revelation. Leaving New York for Europe allowed James
to tie together two different poles o f experience; he learns to connect the
world of objective facts and to the realm of creative interpretations.
While it is clear that James’s experience of Europe owed much to the
preconceptions he had constructed, his experience was also colored by illness.
Soon after arriving in England it became evident that James had come down
with malaria and would have to rest. James believed he must have “absorbed
. . . the dull seed of malaria” a year prior on Staten Island (158). But instead
of missing out on the wonders of travel, illness, as it often does, focused
James’s attention to the details around him. He writes: “I recall in particular
certain short sweet times when I could be left alone—with the thick and heavy
suggestions of the London room about me, the very smell o f which was
ancient, strange and impressive, a new revelation altogether, and the window
open to the English June and the far off hum of a thousand possibilities”
(158). Even confined to a sick-bed, James appreciates the creative
possibilities of travel, suggesting that “we seize our property by an avid
instinct wherever we find it, and I must have kept seizing mine at the
absurdest little rate” (158). Any change of scene, despite his physical
limitations, represents, for James, an opportunity for play. We see evidence
of James’s openness to his surroundings, though suffering “chills and fever,”
when the family moves on, after a couple of days, to Paris. Confined to
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viewing Paris from the balcony, James, nonetheless, greets the city as if he
has finally come home. Although he gaped upon the city in the midst o f his
siblings, James suggests that the memorable dialogue was with himself: “I
recover what I felt as so much relation and response to the larger, the largest
appeal only, that of the whole perfect Parisianism I seemed to myself always
to have possessed mentally—even if I had but just turned twelve!” (159). In
this dialogue, James sees himself reflected in the tableau before him:
What I had told myself was of course that the impression
would be of the richest and at the same time of the most
insinuating, and this after all didn’t sail very close; but I
had had before me from far back a picture (which might
have been hung in the very sky,) and here was every
touch in it repeated with a charm. Had I ever till then
known what a charm was? —a large, a local, a social
charm, leaving out that of a few individuals. It was at all
events, this mystery, one’s property—that of one’s mind;
and so, once for all, I helped myself to it from my
balcony and tucked it away. It counted all immensely for
practice in taking in. (159)
The first impressions James offers of this trip to the continent take place from
fixed positions—out the window of their apartment or through the window of
a carriage. With such a limited perspective James turns inward and reflects
self-consciously upon the scene. What he draws forth from his vantage on the
balcony is self-reflection; the mystery is “one’s property—that of one’s
mind.” But the scene does not just exist in James’s mind; rather, the scene
reflects what is in his mind but with a difference, with a charm. The mystery
rests in the intersection of self-reflection and observation directed toward the
outside world.
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The prevailing impression James creates with his reflections upon his
early observations of Europe is that he was being initiated into a holy mystery.
A Small Bov and Others relates that initiation which progresses by creative
leaps throughout the narrative. The first stage is reflected in his expectations
which were aroused by his infantile travels to Europe and his education as to
the possibilities of travel while in New York. The second stage encompasses
the visual perception of Europe, such as when riding atop the carriage and
taking in the scenes that played out before him. One such scene transpires as
James lay, still suffering from the malaria, recumbent in a carriage and taking
in an unexpected view of “a castle and a ruin” with the evocative addition of
“a woman in a black bodice, a white shirt and a red petticoat, engaged in
some sort of field labour.” For James, this scene is a revelation of unknown
depths, “an amount of character I had felt no scene present.” The impact of
the vision seems to be felt somewhere between the physical perception and
the mental receptivity towards it, and James tries to explain why this image
created such an impression:
Supremely, in that ecstatic vision, was ‘Europe,’ sublime
synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me—as if by a
mystic gage, which spread all through the summer air,
that I should now, only now, never lose it, hold the whole
consistency of it: up to that time it might have been but
mockingly whisked before me. Europe mightn’t have
been flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most
signified and summarized in a sordid old woman scraping
a mean living and an uninhabitable tower abandoned to
the owls; that was but the momentary measure of a small
sick boy, however, and the virtue o f the impression was
proportioned to my capacity. It made a bridge over to
more things than I then knew. (161)
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Partly because of his illness and partly because of his expectations, James is
in a particularly receptive frame o f mind; this is an instance in which the
timing is everything and his mood, almost magically, matches the scene
before him. And what transpires at this moment is that James feels a sense of
connection between all the various strains of his experiences, as though
Europe helped, somehow, to make sense of his life.
In writing the autobiography, James recognized the difficulty of fully
explaining this experience, that there remained something intangible in that
magical moment. Yet James tries, nevertheless, to paradoxically explain
“depth”:
That was the sense of it—the character, in the whole
place, pressed upon me with a force I hadn’t met and that
was beyond my analysis—which is but another way of
saying how directly notified I felt that such material
conditions as I had known could have had no depth at all.
Again, James makes a contrast between the “soothing flatness” of New York
and the fertile potential of Europe, appropriately expressed in this agricultural
scene. And although James cannot adequately define his experience, he can
still conclude that such depth made for “reverberations finer and more
momentous, personal, experimental” (164).
After this observation and revelation, James discovers the pleasure of
travel and his narrative becomes a travel sketch describing Paris. James falls
in love with Paris because, like Louis De Coppet, it suggests a connection
between travel and creativity. In Paris, life is art: “Which is to say indeed but
that life and manners were more pointedly and harmoniously expressed, under
our noses there, than we had perhaps found them anywhere save in the most
salient passages of ‘stories’” (190). This connection is only strengthened
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when James visits the temples o f creativity—the Louvre and its Galerie
d’Apollon—and his initiation into the wonders of Europe becomes complete.
James is particularly struck by the art o f Paul Delaroche, to which James at
tributes his first insight into the psychological in art. Delaroche’s painting
“was a reconstitution of far-off history of the subtlest and most ‘last word’
modem or psychologic kind. I had never heard of psychology in art or
anywhere else—scarcely anyone then had; but I truly felt the nameless force
at play” (194). James had been living with the nameless force, but only
through his European journey does he find its expression. Although James
spends much time setting up his European travels, he is unambiguous in his
assertion that his artistic life began with these travels:
That, with so many o f the conditions repeated, is the
charm—to feel afresh the beginning of so much that was
to be. The beginning in short was with Gericault and
David, but it went on and on and slowly spread; so that
one’s tensions piece by piece, come back, on the great
premises, almost as so many explorations of the house of
life, so many circlings and hoverings round the image of
the world.
Creativity begins with physical travel but it does not end there as travel also
becomes a figure—“explorations o f the house of life .. .. ” Finally, James
asserts, “the house of life and the palace of art became so mixed and
interchangeable” (198). With travel James discovered a potential space in
which the objective and subjective world merged into the creation of art.
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Notes
1 See Habegger, p. 10.
2 The fragment of autobiography is a work titled “Immortal Life: Illustrated
in a Brief Autobiographic Sketch of the Late Stephen Dewhurst. Edited, with an
Introduction by Henry James.” William James collected this fragment and wrote
footnotes to clarify his father’s fictionalizing of his life story. Henry James Sr.
not only changed names, but also places and events: Stephen Dewhurst loses an
arm, not a leg.
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Chapter Three
“Spells and Almost Miracles”:
James’s Travel Writings
It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of
comparing one race with another, and
weighing in opposed groups the manners and
customs o f neighbouring countries; but it is
certain that as we move about the world we
constantly indulge in this exercise. This is
especially the case if we happen to be
infected with the baleful spirit o f the
cosmopolite—that uncomfortable
consequence o f seeing many lands and
feeling at home in none.
Henry James.
It is only the wonderful traveler who sees a
wonder, and only five travelers in the
world’s history have seen wonders.
Henry Miller.
Travel is one of the adornments of wealth and power and therefore it
is not surprising that as the United States became a world power in the late
nineteenth century American travelers headed to Europe in what appears to
have been a reverse colonization. One can readily recognize the imperial
aspirations of these American travelers in the great collectors such as
Carnegie and Hearst, but as Mary Pratt points out in Imperial Eves.
imperialism is also expressed through travel in subtler ways. As the title of
her book suggests, imperialism is conveyed not only through physically
taking—raping, pillaging, robbing and buying cheap—but also through the act
of seeing. The written accounts of explorers create a hierarchy of power in
which the writer dominates by interpreting the world through his or her
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cultural assumptions. This violence of thought worked to buoy the imperial
aspirations of the European countries of the eighteenth century by deeming
conquered or explored people and places as not only physically inferior, but
by objectifying them and creating the category of the “Other.” Creating this
inequality reduced stress on the European conscience as they continued
exploring, conquering and subjugating.
The “imperial eye,” Pratt suggests is represented by two different
types of seers, which she names the “scientific” and the “sentimental”
travelers, both of which help to oil the wheels of imperialism. She writes that
in travel literature “science and sentiment code the imperial frontier in the
two eternally clashing and complementary languages of bourgeois
subjectivity” (39). The scientific view attempts to assert “an urban, lettered,
male authority over the whole of the planet; it elaborated a rationalizing,
extractive, dissociative understanding which overlaid functional, experiential
relations among people, plants, and animals” (38). In other words, once one
can categorize the various lives on the planet one need not directly relate to
any individual, therefore occluding individual human rights abuses, and
further legitimizing policy by connecting it to the perceived needs of scientific
inquiry. Coinciding with this scientific traveler is the sentimental traveler
who is seemingly opposed to the objectifying scientist; while scientific
objectivity is dependent upon “detachment of what is said from the
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subjectivity of both the speaker and the experiencer. . . sentimental writing
explicitly anchors what is being expressed in the sensory experience,
judgment, agency, or desires of human subjects. Authority lies in the
authenticity of somebody’s felt experience” (76). Yet, despite such radical
differences, Pratt argues that these experiences are really two sides of one
coin because they both are attempts at mastering and controlling an outside
world.
Pratt’s argument is suggestive and leads the reader beyond eighteenth
century explorations o f Africa, South America and the Pacific. According to
Pratt, not only do these ways of seeing define the world outside Europe, but
they help Europe to define elements within its own borders:
many of the conventions and writing strategies I associate
here with imperial expansionism characterize travel
writing about Europe as well... The discourses that
legitimate bourgeois authority and deligitimate peasant
and subsistence lifeways, for example, can be expected to
do this ideological work within Europe as well as in
southern Africa or Argentina. . . The eighteenth century
has been identified as a period in which Northern Europe
asserted itself as the center of civilization, claiming the
legacy of the Mediterranean as its own. It is not
surprising, then to find German or British accounts of Italy
sounding like German or British accounts of Brazil. (10)
And to push the argument even farther, one would expect that travelers from
the United States, at least from the middle of the nineteenth century, to
exhibit the same appropriating vision not only towards Asia, South America,
and Africa, but towards Europe as well.
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Indeed, Henry James can be interpreted through the prism of Pratt’s
theory as he, in many ways, fits the definition of the “sentimental traveler.”
Without apology he interprets through his subjectivity and at times his travel
writings even fall into what Pratt calls “the monarch-of-all-I-survey genre”
(201). As this phrase suggests, the writer takes control of the scene and
makes it his or her own by creating visual descriptions that serve as aesthetic
objects. Pratt describes this appropriating as a three step process:
First, and most obvious, the landscape is estheticized. The
sight is seen as a painting and the description is ordered in
terms of background, foreground, symmetries between
foam-flecked water and mist-flecked hills, and so forth...
. Second, density of meaning in the passage is sought. The
landscape is represented as extremely rich in material and
semantic substance. This density is achieved especially
through a huge number of adjectival modifiers—scarcely a
noun in the text is unmodified. . . . The third strategy at
work here has been discussed off and on throughout this
book: the relation of mastery predicated between the seer
and the seen. The metaphor of the painting itself is
suggestive. If the scene is a painting, then Burton
[Richard Burton’s Lake Regions of Central Africal is both
the viewer there to judge and appreciate it, and the verbal
painter who produces it for others. From the painting
analogy it also follows that what Burton sees is ail there is,
and that the landscape was intended to be viewed from
where he has emerged upon it. Thus the scene is
deictically ordered with reference to his vantage point, and
is static. (204-5)
The reference to painting is particularly appropriate because James makes
connections between the sights of travel and pictures remembered from his
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youth. James writes about the “composition” of the scenes he records for the
“Old Suffolk” chapter of English Hours:
One never need be bored, after all, when ‘composition’
really rules. It rules in the way the brown hamlet
disposes itself, and the gray square tower of the church,
in just the right relation, peeps out of trees that remind
me exactly of those which, in the frontispieces of Birket
Foster, offered to my childish credulity the very essence
of England. (260)
The scene makes sense and is aesthetically satisfying because it matches up
with the art of the English painter and illustrator, Myles Birket Foster, who
James had undoubtedly remembered from his childhood. James frequently
makes reference to the composing of scenes, and he is also quick to suggest
he has taken possession of foreign sights; in the chapter “London” he remarks
about his view of Liverpool: “I felt as if I had an exclusive property in the
impression” (English 14).
But part of the charm of James’s travel sketches is that as he falls into
the conventions of the “imperial eye” he also seems to be playing with them
and often pushes this trope to an absurd degree. For instance, James reflects
upon shopping in London: “Memorable is a rush I made into a glover’s at
Charing Cross.... Keen within me was a sense of the importance of
deflowering, of despoiling the shop” (English 18). The reader can sense the
irony which recalls Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock.” James, ostensibly a
virgin, transforms shopping for bargains, a role associated with women
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travelers, into the mockingly masculine affair of “deflowering.” And in other
situations, James turn his self-deprecating humor upon his fellow travelers as
well. He writes about the inevitable sketchers at Ludlow Castle: “These are
the only besiegers to which the place is exposed now, and they can do no
great harm, as I doubt whether the young lady’s aim is very good” (English
192-3). The humor comes from fashioning himself and his fellow Americans
as invaders who no longer have the will or the way to conquer the places they
visit.
One intriguing questions for James scholars is why James, a traveler
from his youth, was seemingly tame in his choice of destinations. He seemed
to harbor no desire to see Egypt, India or Japan, or even St. Petersburg and
Istanbul, but rather kept to the circle o f England, France, Italy, Germany and
the United States. In fact, the most far flung travel for James was a trip to the
western United States in 1905, in which he gathered material for the second
part of The American Scene, which he never came around to writing. Carl
Smith, in an article on James’s travel writings, reflects on James’s reasons for
limiting his travel:
He deliberately limited his travels to places with which
he had a familiarity that might best be called a prevision,
an expectation (usually formed by reading or by a
previous visit) of how these places would appear and
what they would seem to mean to him. A major part of
his adventure as traveler and travel writer was
internalized, centering on how much the imaginative
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associations behind this prevision would shape what he
saw and affect his over-all impression. (373)
James’s destinations are places that seem to have had all the potential for
discovery knocked out of them and all that is left is for the writer is to turn
inward. James is the “sentimental tourist” but usually with a wink that
acknowledges his limited power to control the scenes he represents. He is
modest in his ability to reach his objective, taking the outside world and
translating it into an internally coherent scene, but he strives for such
integration of inner and outer worlds just the same. In Pratt’s words, James
strives for an “imperial eye,” but not for the sake of the imperialistic powers
of England and the United States; rather he is working for his own
psychological well being.
The question is whether the “imperial eye” is something peculiar to
western imperialistic culture or whether it is survival mechanism common to
human experience. Object relations theorists suggest that we all create
integrative visions on the cusp where inside and outside worlds interact.
Gilbert Rose, a professor of Psychiatry, in the article “The Creativity of
Everyday Life” writes:
Making use o f universal themes around birth and death,
bodily forms and fusions, Man performs his human task,
journeying in the transitional area between degrees of
narcissistic fusion and separateness, creating the unique
form o f his own identity to become what he is in a world
from which he abstracts what will constitute for him, his
reality. (464)
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Travel writing might very well further the aims of imperial powers, but at the
same time it also addresses a typical human response to an outside world. In
this view, travel writing is not an obfuscation of ulterior motives; rather, it is
the end of a process in which the writer tries to master reality. According to
Rose, “the function o f myth, religion, art, language, and science is not, for
example, escape through wishful distortion of the world, but orientation in
it—a system of ideas to envisage one’s relationship to society, the world, life
and death—all in the service of the reality principle” (Rose 349).
I began this chapter with Pratt’s Imperial Eves because it would seem
irresponsible not to put James into the framework of her theory. Of course, he
is appropriating others for his own personal gain. First, he is making his
living from travel writing; long before his novels and short stories paid, he
turned out hundreds o f pages of travel sketches for American newspapers and
magazines such as The Nation. Lippincott’s Magazine, and The Galaxy. And
second, he does perpetuate the myth of the noble European peasants working
the fields in blissful ignorance, although, at times, as I will show, he pokes
some fun at his own misperceptions in this regard. But my main point is that
James gained psychologically by integrating disparate elements of himself and
his environment through travel writing. One should not, however, lump all
his travels together because James’s response to various environments is not
the same; as he travels south he not only sees different things but he feels
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different as well. James’s travel sketches represent various levels of comfort,
from the most comfortable England, where he made his home, to the more
romantic France and finally to the most magical place of Italy. In ranging
over this terrain he exerts mastery and gains in confidence, and ironically, part
of that mastery and confidence comes from realizing there are times it is
better just to let go.
England
By the time James began writing travel sketches of Europe he was
twenty-nine years old and already on his fifth tour. He had been taken to
Europe three times as a child and made the trip himself in 1869, but the trip of
1872, accompanying his Aunt Kate and Sister Alice, marks the beginning of a
voluminous collection o f travel writings which he continued to produce into
the twentieth century. While most of those articles were published in
periodicals, James later collected many of them in books such as English
Hours which includes most of his writings on England. My analysis begins
with England because unlike France and Italy, it serves more as a transitional
site, lodged somewhere between the foreign Continent and his home of New
York. Of course, England also became James’s adopted home, the place he
perceived as most congenial to his creativity.
England stood as the doorway to James’s European experience, and
he, like most travel writers pays particular attention to arrivals. Pratt reflects
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on the importance of these transitional moments: “arrival scenes are a
convention of almost every variety of travel writing and serve as particularly
potent sites for framing relations of contact and setting the terms of its
representation” (78-80). James treats the transportation between countries as
a necessary inconvenience; one must endure it to get from here to there,
whether that here and there be two countries or two chapters that need
transition for the sake of narrative continuity. Still, James does not dwell on
the onerous transatlantic voyage:
If the Atlantic voyage be counted, as it certainly may, even
with the ocean in a fairly good humour, an emphatic zero
in the sum of one’s better experience, the American
traveller arriving at this venerable town finds himself
transported, without a sensible gradation, from the edge of
the New World to the very heart of the Old. (English 52)
The journey itself adds up to nothing, but that nothing begets something, a
seamless transition between worlds. The transition is framed not so much a
movement in geographical space as it is a movement backward in time. But
no matter what kind of movement the voyage entailed, James downplays the
voyage itself and focuses on the place of arrival—Chester—which will
inaugurate European vacation. While the ship’s passage is unremarkable,
James has much to write about that arrival in Chester.
James begins by making a game o f his arrival, the game of “playing at
first impressions for a second time” in which he competes with “a cynical
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adversary”—apathy. James recounts a friend’s “bitter lament” about losing
the appreciation for the English scene:
I suspected it but now I know it—now that my heart beats
but once where it beat a dozen times before, and that
where I found sermons in stones and pictures in
meadows, delicious revelations and intimations ineffable,
I find nothing but hard, heavy prose of British
civilisation. (54)
The friend’s familiarity with England seems to breed contempt. James must
get past this wall o f cynicism, and appropriately, as he enters into the strange
land, James does so by describing the wall which surrounds Chester. Unlike
the transatlantic voyage which represented a barrier one had to pass through,
Chester’s wall is a place to dwell because it so perfectly betrays an
American’s expectations. James writes,
it is full of that delightful element of the crooked, the
accidental, the unforeseen, which to American eyes,
accustomed to our eternal straight lines and right angles,
is the striking feature of European street scenery. An
American strolling in the Chester streets finds a perfect
feast of crookedness—of those random comers,
projections and recesses, odd domestic interspaces
charmingly saved or lost, those innumerable architectural
surprises and caprices and fantasies which lead to such
refreshing exercise a vision benumbed by brown-stone
fronts. (56)
The American vision is “benumbed” and European sights serve to shake off
such doldrums. Unlike the American scene which matches one’s lowest
expectations, Europe offers “architectural surprises and caprices and
fantasies” which, James suggests, translate, when exposed to them from
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childhood, into artistic creativity: “There is a vivid reflection of this magic in
some of the early pages of Dickens’ ‘Copperfield’ and of George Eliot’s ‘Mill
on the Floss,’ the writers having had the happiness of growing up among old,
old things” (57).
But just as James creates this theory of the artistic possibilities of
antiquity, he undercuts it with his reflections on a disappointing sermon heard
in Chester Cathedral. Despite the congenial surroundings, he found the
sermon flat and this insight leads James into a reconsideration of an American
upbringing: “the sermon, beneath that triply consecrated vault, should have
had a builded majesty. It had not;... An American, I think, is not incapable
of taking a secret satisfaction in an incongruity of this kind. He finds with
relief that even mortals reared as in the ring of a perpetual circus are only
mortals” (65). James speculates that if it were not for such incongruities
Americans would hang their heads and “wonder vaguely whether this be not a
richer race as well as a lovelier land.” But James finds the gaps which even
an American can fill. Emerson protested, “the sun shines today also,” and
James echoes that idea, as he reflects on the lack of inspiration among most of
the English. While the English live in the luxury of the old, it is the American
who, with fresh eyes, can appreciate such antiquity:
our poor sentimental tourist begins to hold up his head
again and to reflect that so far as we have opportunities
we mostly rise to them. I am not sure indeed that in the
excess of his reaction he is not tempted to accuse his
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English neighbours of being impenetrable and uninspired,
to affirm that they do not half discern their good fortune,
and that it takes passionate pilgrims, vague aliens and
other disinherited persons to appreciate the ‘points’ of
this admirable country. (66)
James is feeling for the cracks in the wall in which he can enter the European
scene and he positions himself, remarkably, as a “disinherited person.” The
trope o f the displaced traveler is somewhat conventional, as Pratt points out
when she discusses the travel writings o f Alexander von Humboldt: “In a
paradigm most often associated with Victorian women travelers, what set
Alexander von Humboldt in motion was inheritance and a long-awaited
orphanhood” (115). While James is not literally orphaned, he fashions
himself as one and as I pointed out in chapter two, James had long imagined
the freedom of the orphan’s life. Through travel he finds a way to partake of
that freedom.
Chester provided the break from the American scene, and James
developed his own style of travel which suited his temperament. The
eighteenth century marked the beginning o f the packaged tour and James held
this type of traveling in disdain. In an uncollected travel piece, “The Suburbs
of London” (1877), James explains his reasons for avoiding Windsor Castle:
“I should have to go through them in the company of a large assemblage of
fellow starers, ‘personally conducted,’ like Mr. Cook’s tourists, by a droning
custodian, and shuffling in dull, gregarious fashion over the miles o f polished
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floor and through the vistas o f gilded chambers in which they are requested
not to ‘touch’” (281). James goes on to say that he dislikes going into any
house without forming a relationship with the master, but he is particularly
annoyed by the other tourists; “it is, however, one’s fellow starers, one’s
fellow shufflers, that make the shoe pinch” (282). Instead o f freedom, the
packaged tour pinches and constrains because one cannot escape the press of
the crowd.
The antidote for such feelings of being stifled, James finds, is often a
walk in the park. In the travel sketch “Lichfield and Warwick” (1872) James
writes about the subtle pleasures of discovery in a walk amidst the Derbyshire
hills to Haddon Hall. Again, James is not alone in his pilgrimage and tells us
as much: he writes that he was “fatally apt to meet a dozen fellow pilgrims
returning from the shrine, each as big a fool, so to speak, as he ever was, or to
overtake a dozen more telegraphing their impressions down the line as they
arrive” (73). Yet despite the region being “infested. . . by Americans,” James
is able to create a feeling of solitude. Achieving this state of detachment from
the crowd, James writes, “I felt not like a dusty tourist, but like a successful
adventurer” (74). For James, solitude does not mean the absence of company;
solitude comes from a certain response to the company around him. Of
course, this question of solitude and the crowd reminds one of Emerson and,
during his reflections on Ilfracombe, James seems to echo Thoreau as well;
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he considers whether a more isolated, natural setting might be what he needs:
“I wondered whether change perfect enough to be salutary does not imply
something more pathless, more idle, more unreclaimed from that deep-
bosomed nature to which the overwrought mind reverts with passionate
longing; something after all attainable at a moderate distance from New York
and Boston” (88-9). James answers this question by suggesting that, for an
Englishman, a “solitude tempered by old ladies and sheep” might not be
enough to offer “rest and change and oblivion of the ponderous social burden”
(88). But for an American, like himself, he concludes, the English
environment offers the perfect balance of freedom and restraint. James feels
that he is reconciling extremes in England, that he does not need the rough
nature of the new world, but can settle for the tame, manicured wilderness of
the old world.
Like Thoreau, James was also concerned with the apparent conformity
of his peers and he is particularly struck by the behavior of the English. In the
chapter “An English Easter,” James comments upon the odd way the English
spend their holiday:
In no other country, I imagine, are so many people to be
found doing the same thing in the same way at the same
time— using the same slang, wearing the same hats and
neckties, collecting the same china-plates, playing the
same game of lawn-tennis or of polo, admiring the same
professional beauty. The monotony of such a spectacle
would soon become oppressive if the foreign observer
were not conscious o f this latent capacity in the
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performers for great freedom of action; he finds a good
deal o f entertainment in wondering how they reconcile
the traditional insularity o f the private person with this
perpetual tribute to usage. (106)
England presents a strange combination o f the extremes o f privacy with
extremes of conformity, but instead of finding lives of “quiet desperation,”
James finds strength and creativity in this negotiation between the public and
the private life.
Indeed, travel, for James, offers a way to reconcile extremes of
“insularity” and the social. James admires the way the English balance these
positions, and he discovers that he can best develop his own balance while on
the road, away from America and his family. England offers him the distinct
feeling of separation amidst connections. James writes:
Practically, of course, one lives in a quarter, in a plot; but
in imagination and by a constant mental act o f reference
the accommodated haunter enjoys the whole— and it is
only of him that I deem it worth while to speak. He
fancies himself, as they say, for being a particle in so
unequaled an aggregation; and its immeasurable
circumference, even though unvisited and lost in smoke,
gives him the sense of a social, and intellectual margin.
There is a luxury in the knowledge that he may come and
go without being noticed, even when his comings and
goings have no nefarious end. (19)
While individuals are partitioned and involved in their own particular stories
or plots, they continue to sense a broader base of connection available to
them. The experience of England, and London especially, for the “passionate
pilgrim,” is one of being happily lost in the crowd. The possibilities for
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connection, “so unequaled an aggregation,” are enough to create the
intellectual margin in which his creativity could be nurtured. The thought of
the “unvisited and lost in smoke” conjures up a congenial world in which
James can watch, aware of others around him, without being stifled by too
much attention; just as England clouds itself in a fog, the writer can also step
back from the light and into an opaque world which provided, strangely
enough, both a safe and an evocative place.
Such reflections on England’s congeniality towards artistic creativity
are often expressed by James in analogies between the architecture of the
country and the architecture of the mind. James writes of the “truths” of
London, namely the fact that there is nothing one cannot study there:
They [the truths] colour the thick, dim distances which in
my opinion are the most romantic town-vistas in the
world; they mingle with the troubled light to which the
straight, ungamished aperture in one’s dull, undistinctive
housefront affords a passage and which makes an interior
of friendly comers, mysterious tones and unbetrayed
ingenuities, as well as with the low, magnificent medium
of the sky, where the smoke and fog and the weather in
general, the strangely undefined hour of the day and
season of the year, the emanations of industries and the
reflections of furnaces, the red gleams and blurs that may
or may not be of sunset—as you never see any source of
radiance you can’t in the least tell—all hang together in a
confusion, a complication, a shifting but irremovable
canopy. They form the undertone of the deep, perpetual
voice of the place. (20)
The ugly, indistinguishable exteriors of London give the interiors a greater
character. And again, James presents the image of stepping out of the light—
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England is so far out o f the light that one cannot even identify the sunset—and
into a layered, complicated, convoluted interior world. As this gothic
description suggests, James finds London intense. Indeed, it is too intense to
call it his home, yet he recognizes its value. James concludes his analogy
between outer and inner spaces, suggesting that “as a place to be happy in,
London will never do .. . but once in a while the best believer recognises the
impulse to set his religion in order, to sweep the temple o f his thoughts and
trim the sacred lamp. It is at such hours as this that he reflects with elation
that the British capital is the particular spot in the world which communicates
the greatest sense of life” (21). London serves, for James, as a peculiar
version of Walden Pond, that experimental place away from the crowd where
Thoreau sought truths. James is also searching for truths and trying to answer
the questions of where to live and what to live for, but instead o f finding truth
away from the crowd, James proposes to find it in the midst of one.
James’s life did become an experiment in how to live deliberately as
he tried living, between 1872 and 1897, in Paris, Rome, Florence and London,
but none of them proved suitable for long term residence. Thoreau writes
about his own reluctance to be settled, reflecting on buying a house: “I think I
shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be
buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last” (57). James seems to
think along those lines as well, although he always held out the possibility that
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he could find happiness in being settled. In the chapter “Abbeys and Castles”
James ponders the charm o f owning property in England:
I do not think, even, that my sensibility to the charm of
this delightful region... was conditioned upon having
‘property’ in the neighbourhood, so that the little girls in
the town should suddenly drop curtsies to me in the
street; though that too would certainly have been
pleasant. At the same time having a little property would
without doubt have made the attachment stronger.
People who wander about the world without money in
their pockets indulge in dreams—dreams of things they
would buy if their pockets were workable. (185)
James jokes about the value of living without money, but through his
deliberate wandering he shows that he was not going to buy greedily. He
walked around the idea of settling down for twenty years before finally
making a decision on where to live; the place he chose was, significantly, an
English country estate—Lamb House—in which James took residence in
1897.
France
England, represents for James, not so much a movement in space as a
movement backwards in time. England was not only his home away from
home; it was also his heritage. James clearly expresses this sentiment when
he visits the French town o f Poitiers—the site o f a medieval battle between
England and France—and reflects on the English victory: “It was something
done, I know not how justly, for England; and what was done in the
fourteenth century for England was done also for New York” (A Little 140).
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James cannot escape the historical connection with England, a connection he
considered one of “race”—a word he defined much like we currently define
the word “nationality.” But while England offers an immediate connection
allowing James to tap into his historical imagination, France and Italy offer
foreign experiences which fueled his creativity, not by bringing the past to
life, but by creating imaginative spaces in which James could play, as his
French cousin Marie did, at making scenes.
Part of James’s fascination with France emanates from the belief that
the south is a land of fecundity and sun in which both muscles and morals are
relaxed. The idea that latitude had an impact on psychology developed along
with European imperialism in the eighteenth century and helped to rationalize
aggressive governmental policies. But as I pointed out earlier, Pratt suggests
that such theorizing about race went beyond rationalizing the control of
Africans and Pacific Islanders. This romantic notion about the south also
came back to Europe helping to support a distinction between the hard
working northern Europeans and their comparatively indolent and immoral
neighbors to the south. James, albeit without malicious intent, seems to pick
up and promote this idea:
Whenever I go southward, if it be only twenty miles, I
begin to look out for the south, prepared as I am to find
the careless grace of those latitudes even in things of
which it may be said that they may be south of
something, but are not southern. To go from Boston to
New York (in this state of mind) is almost as soft a
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sensation as descending the Italian side of the Alps; and
to go from New York to Philadelphia is to enter a zone of
tropical luxuriance and warmth. Given this absurd
disposition, I could not fail to flatter myself, on reaching
La Rochelle, that I was already in the Midi, and to
perceive in everything, in the language of the country, the
caractere meridional. (A Little 127)
On the one hand, James is supporting the idea that there is a “southern
character” which is somehow makes life easier and less stressful. But James
also complicates his views with his humorous remarks about New York as
being Southern when compared to Boston; he laughs at his assumptions even
as he upholds them. But perhaps the key is the phrase “in this state of mind,”
because James might not so much believe the stereotypes of southern living so
much as he feels he can use them to achieve a different perspective.
While James’s beliefs in the romantic south are clouded by his
humorous approach, he still holds on to them because they are useful for
explaining the psychological expansion brought on by travel. Like the
European powers, James does desire an imperial expansion, but he is not
working for the state. The expansion he pursues is a spreading o f his own
inner borders. Thoreau touched upon this idea of expanding the self when he
wrote that extravagance, or as he put it—extra vagance—“depends on how
you are yarded” (214). James increases his yardage through his excursions
into France and Italy. In an address made at the outset of the First World War,
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James discusses the importance of France as an ingredient in individual
growth:
France lay very much in our path, our path to almost
everything that could beckon us forth from our base—and
that there were very few things in the world or places on
the globe that didn’t so beckon us; according to which
she helped us along on our expansive course a good deal
more, doubtless, than either she or we always knew.
(774)
James points to the psychological nature o f his travels through France. He is
in touch with his base while in England, because he is, at once, far from the
stifling influence of his family, and he feels at home with the English culture.
But traveling in France is markedly different because it disturbs that “base”
and begets a creative atmosphere in which the artist can play. James
continues his homage to France:
What it has all amounted to, as I say, is that we have
never known otherwise an agent so beautifully organised,
organised from within, for a mission, and that such an
organisation at free play has made us really want never to
lift a finger to break the charm. (“France” 775-6)
Unlike the flatness of the United States, and the thick historical associations
of England, France represents “free play” and a kind of “charm.” France is
James’s playground; not only did he reach his childhood consciousness there,
but his adult excursions recreate the child’s feeling of open ended
possibilities.
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Throughout his writings on France, James conveys this feeling of
open-ended possibilities through images and suggestions o f “light,” both
through his tone and through his many descriptions o f the French sunlight.
Most of James’s writings about France are collected in A Little Tour in
France, published serially in the Atlantic Monthly from July-November 1883.
The title itself conveys lightness as does James’s introduction in which he
asks not to be taken too seriously; he is, after all, only following up on the
question of whether there is anything to see of France outside of Paris. James,
referring to himself in the third person, describes his effort to challenge the
assumption that Paris represents all of France:
The light pages in question are but the simple record of a
small personal effort to shake it off. He took, it must be
confessed, no extraordinary measures; he merely started,
one rainy morning in mid-September, for the charming
little city of Tours, where he felt that he might as
immediately as anywhere else see it demonstrated that,
though France might be Paris, Paris was by no means
France. The beauty of the demonstration—quite as
prompt as he could have desired—drew him considerably
farther, and his modest but eminently successful
adventure begot, as aids to amused remembrance, a few
informal notes. (18)
James stresses the informality of his writing; indeed, he does not even
consider these pieces essays, but “notes.” And then James follows through on
his plan to keep the pages light with the first line o f the first chapter: “I am
ashamed to begin with saying that Touraine is the garden o f France; that
remark has long ago lost its bloom” (19). Travel writing gives James the
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perfect opportunity to play with language and that playfulness is evident here,
beginning with both a cliche and a pun.
Besides the lightness in tone, James makes light and space recurrent
images throughout the travel sketches. The key words that conjure the
meaning of France for James are “charm,” “lightness,” and “brightness,” and
he uses these terms consistently throughout A Little Tour in France. We see
all three words come to bear in his description of Le Mans, not when he is
visiting the historic cathedral which he finds disappointing, but when he is
taking his dinner “at the door of one of the cafes in the market-place with a
bitter-et-curacao (invaluable pretext at such an hour!) to keep [him]
company.” This moment becomes a transcendental moment in which James
feels physically and emotionally integrated with his surroundings. He writes,
I remember that in this situation there came over me an
impression which both included and excluded all possible
disappointments. The afternoon was warm and still; the
air was admirably soft. The good Manceaux, in little
groups and pairs, were seated near me; my ear was
soothed by the fine shades of French enunciation, by the
detached syllables of that perfect tongue. There was
nothing in particular in the prospect to charm; it was an
average French view. Yet I felt a charm, a kind of
sympathy, a sense of the completeness of French life and
of the lightness and brightness of the social air, together
with a desire to arrive at friendly judgments, to express a
positive interest. I know not why this transcendental
mood should have descended upon me then and there; but
that idle half-hour in front of the cafe, in the mild October
afternoon suffused with human sound, is perhaps the most
abiding thing I brought away from Le Mans. (112)
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Unlike the United States and England which are highly charged atmospheres,
France is a seemingly neutral space in which James can experience temporary
indifference. The scene at the cafe “included and excluded all possible
disappointments”; in other words, it is a moment of creative potential. This
potential is also expressed when James returns to Provence. He writes, “It
was a pleasure to feel one’s self in Provence again—the land where the silver-
grey earth is impregnated with the light of the sky” (187). The light o f the
French sky has the ultimate creative power, impregnating the earth. And
again, when commenting on Tarascon James writes, “Nothing could have
been brighter, easier, or more suggestive of amiable indifference, than the
picture it presented to my mind” (205). Brightness and indifference go
together to create a positive, receptive psychological mood.
But while James’s travel writings are psychological, he never forsakes
the outer world for the inner. And that is why James is best considered in the
light of object-relations theories; he is determined to inhabit the spaces where
inside and outside worlds mingle. James is much like the narrator of his short
story, “The Real Thing,” who becomes fascinated with the real, even to the
detriment of his art. Like that narrator, a visual artist, James cannot shake a
fascination with accurate representation and in A Little Tour in France he
even takes Stendhal to task for not paying close enough attention to the real in
his Memoires d’un Touriste. Although James recommends this book to all
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travelers to France, he also points out that Stendhal “has the defect that he is
never pictorial, that he never by any chance makes an image, and that his style
is perversely colourless for a man so fond of contemplation” (183).
Furthermore, James claims, Stendhal’s “want of appreciation of the
picturesque—want of the sketcher’s sense—causes him to miss half the charm
of a landscape which is nothing if not "quiet,’ as a painter would say, and of
which the felicities reveal themselves only to waiting eyes.” In other words,
the psychological meaning or benefits of travel—the charm—only come when
one can see with the visual artist’s clarity. James continues, suggesting that
Stendhal was “strangely indifferent, for a man of imagination, to those
superficial aspects of things which the poor pages now before the reader are
mainly an attempt to render” (184). In each quotation, James is careful to tie
together sketching the outside world with an inner state o f contemplation or
imagination. The point is that Stendhal is a man of imagination and
contemplation and therefore he should be able to see and describe the outer
world with more accuracy. For James, these two experiences go hand in
hand; to see and describe the outside world clearly is to inhabit artistic spaces
in which inner and outer are reconciled and as James suggests, this is what he
hopes his “poor pages” will do.
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Italy
France and Italy both figure as imaginative openings for James, but he
did not consider them equal. Rather, James represents France as being on the
road to Italy, both geographically and psychologically, for while they are both
south of England, Italy is still further south of France. And while France
represents open spaces and creative potential, Italy is more accurately
described as the mother lode of impressions. The images are more lasting and
intrusive as James, on two occasions, finds himself, surprisingly, thinking
about Italy when writing of his travels in France. James questions his roving
focus, “Why I should find it a pleasure in France to imagine myself in Italy, is
more than I can say; the illusion has never lasted long enough to be analysed”
(A Little 135). In his reflections on France James generally remains focused
upon the material world that confronts him—he does not stray too far into
memories or other psychological connections—yet there remains something
mysterious about Italy that defies analysis and creeps, uninvited, into
consciousness now and again.
James collected his travel writings about Italy in the volume Italian
Hours, which were written between 1872, among his earliest travel writings,
and 1909, when he reflects back on some of the changes in both himself and
his subject. In one of the earlier pieces, “From Chambery to Milan,” which
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originally appeared in The Nation in 1872, James describes his arrival as he
made the transition from Switzerland to Italy:
Your truly sentimental tourist will never take it from any
occasion that there is absolutely nothing for him, and it
was at Chambery—but four hours from Geneva—that I
accepted the situation and decided there might be
mysterious delights in entering Italy by a whizz through
an eight-mile tunnel, even as a bullet through the bore of
a gun. (365)
James depicts the movement south as violent and decisive; his imagery not
only relies on the gun, but also suggests birth, as he is shot from the darkness
into the light. Italy offers a break from the mundane, as one lands in a more
creative and suggestive world. And other figures occur to him when
reflecting on his arrivals in Italy. On revisiting Italy, James writes: “I had
opened the old book again; the old charm was in the style; I was in a more
delightful world” (390). Here fiction and travel are linked in the figure of the
“old book.” Over time the imagery becomes less shocking to his system, but
Italy remains, nonetheless, impressive.
James’s chief affection for Italy comes from the feeling that, more
than any other place, art and life are intermingled there. He writes, “nowhere,
not even in Holland, where the correspondence between the real aspects and
the little polished canvases is so constant and so exquisite, do art and life
seem so interfused and, as it were, so consanguineous” (303). Nothing
seemed to intrigue James as much as the interstices between art and life, and
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Italy was particularly well suited to examining these intermediary spaces.
James’s interest in the relation between fiction and fact, between dreams and
reality is expressed in the chapter “Roman Neighborhoods,” when James
writes, “The faded frescoes in the chapel at Grotta Ferrata leave us a memory
the more of man’s effort to dream beautifully; and they thus mingle
harmoniously enough with our multifold impressions o f Italy, where dreams
and realities have both kept such pace and so strangely diverged” (462). In
Italy one is continually confronted with great works of art in the midst of a
struggling society, and James is fascinated by that conjunction. While London
represents the real facts of life, a sometimes terrifying picture of work and
economic forces, and France represents open spaces to fill with dreams, Italy
is not so easy to pin down as dreams and realities, art and life, continue to
coexist. While in Italy, James cannot easily distinguish between fact and
fiction, a confusion which for many would create terror and a shut down of
creative ability. But James is able to enjoy those ambiguous spaces in which
his creative instincts grew.
Such Italian impressions create a more relaxed, less judgmental state,
as James learns to be, once again, like a child. In describing a satisfying
journey to Milan in 1873, James lets go of the desire to command the moment
by carefully defining his experience. He resists the urge to take the trip “to
pieces to see what it was made of,” realizing that “there remains in all deeply
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agreeable impressions a charming something we can’t analyse” (380). James
further suggests that an important part of traveling is letting go of grown-up
discriminations:
We surrender to the gaping traveller’s mood, which
surely isn’t the unwisest the heart knows. I don’t envy
people, at any rate, who have outlived or outworn the
simple sweetness of feeling settled to go somewhere with
bag and umbrella. If we are settled on the top of a coach,
and the “somewhere” contains an element of the new and
strange, the case is at its best. In this matter wise people
are content to become children again. We don’t turn
about on our knees to look out of the omnibus-window,
but we indulge in very much the same round-eyed
contemplation of accessible objects. Responsibility is
left at home or at the worst packed away in the valise,
relegated to quite another part of the diligence with the
clean shirts and the writing-case. I sucked in the gladness
of gaping, for this occasion, with the somewhat acrid
juice of my indifferent peaches; it make me think them
very good. (381)
James uses a strange phrase—“settled to go somewhere”—which reverses our
typical understanding of the word “settled.” In James’s world, one is more
settled on the road, away from the “responsibility” which is “left at home.”
And just as James does in his autobiographies, he uses the word “gaping” to
suggest a creative responsiveness to his surroundings. He allows the world to
make an impression.
But while James cannot stop Italy from making an impression upon
him, he is careful to make a distinction between those impressions wrought by
the outside world and those emanating from his narrow psychological and
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sociological perspective. In other words, James recognizes that he is not
always in control of his impressions. While reflecting on his various
responses to Italian art and the way his response has changed over the years,
James suggests the travel writer should include a disclaimer:
And yet it must be added that all this depends vastly on
one’s mood—as a traveller’s impressions do, generally,
to a degree which those who give them to the world
would do well more explicitly to declare. We have our
hours of expansion and those of contraction, and yet
while we follow the traveller’s trade we go about gazing
and judging with unadjusted confidence. We can’t
suspend judgment; we must take our notes, and the notes
are florid or crabbed, as the case my be. (550)
James recognizes the way personality, psychology and other circumstances
affect the traveler’s conclusions, but the answer, James suggests, is not to
avoid conclusions. Rather, he proposes travelers should make reference to the
process by which they reach those conclusions. And with regards to Italy, the
most perplexing country in which James traveled, the process is highlighted.
For instance, in discussing Genoa, “the crookedest and most incoherent of
cities,” he questions the overall value of travel,
A traveller is often moved to ask himself whether it has
been worth while to leave his home—whatever his home
may have been—only to encounter new forms of human
suffering, only to be reminded that toil and privation,
hunger and sorrow and sordid effort, are the portion of
the mass of mankind. To travel is, as it were, to go to the
play, to attend a spectacle; and there is something
heartless in stepping forth into foreign streets to feast on
“character” when character consists simply o f the slightly
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different costume in which labour and want present
themselves. (395)
In France James also saw travel as a form of play but he saw that as
unambiguously positive, while the situation becomes stickier in Italy where
extremes of play and extremes o f human suffering seem to coexist. James
realizes the strange position he is in, trying to create beauty in the midst of
misery, and he can only do that honestly by displaying his writing process:
“Our observation in any foreign land is extremely superficial, and our remarks
are happily not addressed to the inhabitants themselves, who would be sure to
exclaim upon the impudence o f the fancy-picture” (396).
Although James is typically self-conscious in his travel writings, often
poking fun at himself, his self-consciousness reaches a new level in Italy. The
best example of the attempt to reconcile his expectations and the outside
world is when he sees a young man who seems to perfectly complement the
scene James has created in his mind. After describing the romantic scene o f
the “mountain-top,” “the grass-grown pavement,” “the wonderful walls of the
little town, perched on the edge of a shaggy precipice,” and the “chestnuts and
olives,” James sees
a young man who slowly trudged upward with his coat
slung over his shoulder and his hat upon his ear in the
manner of a cavalier in an opera. Like an operatic
performer too he sang as he came; the spectacle,
generally, was operatic, and as his vocal flourishes
reached my ear I said to myself that in Italy accident was
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always romantic and that such a figure had been exactly
what was wanted to set off the landscape. (396)
The image fits James’s romantic frame of mind, until James has the
opportunity to talk to the young man and James discovers a problem with his
impression. Instead of a young man in love with the world James finds the
young man is a “brooding young radical and communist”:
He was an unhappy, underfed, unemployed young man,
who took a hard, grim view of everything and was
operatic only quite in spite of himself. This made it very
absurd of me to have looked at him simply as a graceful
ornament to the prospect, an harmonious little figure in
the middle distance. “Damn the prospect, damn the
middle distance!” would have been all his philosophy.
Yet but for the accident of my having gossipped with him
I should have made him do service, in memory, as an
example of sensuous optimism! (397)
Italy brings James face to face with his own romantic misperceptions. The
travel writer makes the foreign scene “do service,” but occasionally that
service is thwarted by an abrupt interruption of reality. While England is the
land of personal and cultural history and France the land of wide open spaces,
Italy continues to be the land of mystery and surprise. James is like Marlowe
in The Heart of Darkness, who, as he travel down river becomes more
embroiled in mystery. As James moves south he loses any trace of belonging
to “the monarch-of-all-I-survey genre.” He attempts to be the monarch and
make the boy do service but that power structure is quickly upset by James’s
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interest in accuracy. Italy is exciting but it is also humbling and much of the
time, as James admits, he does not know what to make of it.
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Chapter Four
Travel in James’s Short Fiction
“I understand your case... You have the
native American passion—the passion for the
picturesque. With us, I think, it is
primordial—antecedent to experience.
Experience comes and only shows us
something we have dreamt of.”
from “Four Meetings”
“All that you’ve told me is but another way
of saying that you have lived hitherto in
yourself. The tenement’s haunted! Live
abroad! Take an interest!”
from “A Passionate Pilgrim”
“My story begins, properly, I suppose, with my journey.” Thus, James
begins, characteristically, an early short story, “At Isella” (1871), and while
this quotation is spoken by the story’s narrator, it could well serve as the
beginning of one of James’s autobiographies because it gives the impression,
as do the autobiographies, that life began, for James, on the road. James’s
professional success began with his travel sketches, so it is not surprising that
his earliest short stories blur the line between travel literature and fiction.
Indeed, at times there seems little distinction between the two genres; so
much attention is spent on travel descriptions in the fiction that the reader can
feel disoriented and jarred when characters and elements of plot are
reintroduced But while much of the short fiction is taken over, at times
almost clumsily, with insertions of travel sketches, there remain crucial
differences between the two genres. In the travel sketches, for instance,
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James faced both self-imposed and external restrictions that inhibited his
interactions with both his fellow travelers and the people they met.
With the fiction, however, the scope of James’s imagination is
unconstrained; he is no longer a reporter but an inventor. The story, “At
Isella,” is a good example of the way travel and fiction combined to open new
possibilities of response to the environment. As the tale opens, the narrator is
quickly marked as a tourist for whom travel is more a matter of changing
guidebooks than one of changing locations: “Instead of dutifully conning my
Swiss Badeker, I had fretfully deflowered my Murray’s North Italy” (102).
The next nine pages are a travel sketch complete with the self-conscious
observation that as a tourist the narrator faces limits to his knowledge; the
antique houses seem to say, “you may pass and stare and wonder, but you may
never know us” (104). After the narrator makes this admission, however, a
surprising twist occurs as an Italian woman enters the scene. At first she is
merely part of the scene the narrator describes, just an element of the
picturesque background, but in a jarring scene—only slightly less jarring than
when the actors step off the movie screen in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose
of Cairo—she steps out of the picture and becomes involved with the narrator.
Because the first nine pages create a sense of distance between the narrator
and the scene before him, his interaction with the Italian woman seems to
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break the realism of the tale and the juxtaposition of travel and fiction is not
successful.
But while the two elements of travel and fiction are not successfully
combined in “At Isella,” the tale does suggest possibilities that were lacking
in the travel sketches and James would continue to explore the possibilities of
combining travel writing with fictional devices. In early stories such as
“Traveling Companions” (1870) and “A Passionate Pilgrim” (1871), James
more successfully weaves travel sketches into fictional accounts, although the
two elements are still noticeably distinct. In these tales he also begins to
theorize about the relationships between fellow travelers and between
Americans and Europeans. In subsequent stories, such as “Daisy Miller”
(1878) and “An International Episode” (1878-9) James downplays the travel
sketch and masterfully explores the relationships among different types of
travelers, who have now become characters rather than stage properties.
Finally, in his late tales James, does away with the travel sketch altogether,
and in stories like “The Great Good Place” (1900) and “The Jolly Comer”
(1908) he uses travel as a metaphor for the search for one’s self.
1
Henry James began publishing short fiction with “A Tragedy of Error”
(1864), which tells the story of a woman who hires a hitman to murder her
husband; to her dismay, however, the killer mistakenly murders her lover
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instead. While the murderous plot of this tale fits in well with mid-nineteenth
century fiction, it seems atypical of James’s fiction which usually deals with
less felonious domestic conflicts; yet, at the same time, there are ways in
which the plot “The Tragedy of an Error” is particularly Jamesian. Not only
does the story take place in a foreign country, France, but more significantly,
the action is initiated by an arrival; his story begins, properly, with a journey.
Further, as with James’s greatest travel novel, The Ambassadors (1903). this
first published tale begins with an arrival that will apparently act as a check
upon decadent French behavior. But while James was not yet ready to create
the sophisticated, integrative perspective of The Ambassadors, he did have the
sense that stories begin with travel, even when little else in the story is related
to that theme. Many of his early stories have some relation to travel, such as
“The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868) which begins with an
American being sent to England on his sixteenth birthday, but it is not until
James begins traveling on his own in Europe, in 1869, that travel becomes a
predominant theme in his tales. Travel, for James, began as a device of the
plot, a way of moving characters into different situations, but as James
inaugurates his own travels, “travel” shifts from verb to noun—not what one
does but part of what one is—and becomes the object o f his fascination.
James’s first short story that takes up European travel as its central
concern is “Traveling Companions” (1870), which tells the story of a young
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American, Mr. Brooke, who meets two American travelers, Mark Evans and
his appealing daughter, Charlotte, in Milan. The title, at least on the surface,
refers to these fellow tourists who develop a relationship with Brooke due to
the similarity in their plans: first, a tour of Milan, then south to explore
Venice. The main plot revolves around Brooke’s growing desire for
Charlotte, but there are numerous subplots that entangle and complicate the
love story. For instance, Mark Evans and his daughter are not Brooke’s only
traveling companions; he is accompanied by less tangible companions as well,
such as a portmanteau of ideas about travel which can be located in his
passion for Italian art, in his profession of the romance of the “south,” and
through the ever present volume of John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in
Central Italy and Rome (1843). These ideas complete a strange love triangle;
Charlotte is suspicious that his travels affect his relationship to her, that his
surroundings produce a momentary and superficial desire. He needs to
unpack his romantic ideas about travel so that she might be assured that his
love is unfettered. Charlotte is expressing the belief, a belief shared by
Brooke, that travel equals freedom, and therefore sits in opposition to
marriage. The difference between Brooke and Charlotte is that she seems
more willing to let go of travel.
The first sentence of the tale introduces the reader to Brooke as
“traveler” by depicting his attitude towards Italian art and his implication in a
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culture influenced by travel guides. Brooke begins, “The most strictly
impressive picture in Italy is incontestably the Last Supper of Leonardo at
Milan” (1). Not only is he overcome, as he goes on to explain, in
contemplating the painting, but this sentence might have been transposed
from a guide book to Italian travel; not only does it recommend Leonardo’s
painting, but it tells the reader where to find it as well. We also find that
“Murray” is a constant traveling companion to Brooke as he mentions the
guidebook four times throughout the tale. William Stowe, in Going Abroad:
European Travel in the Nineteenth-Century American Culture, writes about
the influence of such guide books as they shifted from handbooks for
scientific explorers into bibles for a consumer culture, suggesting that
Murray’s guide represents a link between the explorer and the tourist.
Referring to John Murray’s depiction o f the traveler, Stowe writes: “The
traveler is a reader and a researcher but also, and perhaps primarily, a
consumer. Successful travel, in other words, combines the satisfactions of the
free, imaginative construction of experience with the joys of shopping” (46).
Brooke certainly conveys the impression o f consumerism with frequent
ejaculations such as “I was prepared thoroughly to ‘do’ Milan” (4).
Along with implicating Brooke in a culture of consumerism,1 James
also ascribes to him the idea that travel offers a form of erotic awakening.
James had played with this notion in English Hours when he “deflowered” a
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local shop, cleverly bringing together shopping, travel and sex. In “Travelling
Companions,” however, his erotic descriptions o f travel are not presented as
off-the-cuff, clever remarks; they are more central to the characters’
motivations. In Italian Hours James depicts his arrival in Italy, entering
through a tunnel, in terms that evoke images of birth and sexual penetration;
in “Travelling Companions” Brooke offers a similarly suggestive description:
There had been moments in Germany when I fancied
myself a clever man; but it now seemed to me that for the
first time I really feU my intellect. Imagination, panting
and exhausted, withdrew from the game; and Observation
stepped into her place, trembling and glowing with open-
eyed desire. (4)
James takes seemingly asexual terms, such as “imagination” and
“observation” and gives them sexually charged attributes. The reader of the
romance expects Brooke to be sexually moved by Charlotte, but first he needs
to be moved by the foreplay of travel; his desire for Charlotte is subsequent to
the awakening of his desire through travel.
Accompanying the association of eroticism and travel is the idea that
the movement south will lead to greater awakening. Brooke expressed this
idea as well, pondering the change in latitude:
This prospect offers a great emotion to the Northern
traveller. A vague, delicious impulse of conquest stirs in
his heart. From his dizzy vantage-point, as he looks down
at her, beautiful, historic, exposed, he embraces the
whole land in the far-reaching range of his desire. “That
is Monte Rosa,” I said; “that is the Simplon pass; there is
the triple glitter of those lovely lakes.” (7)
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Away from home, on the move, Brooke’s desire awakens, and he is aware of
the “delicious impulse of conquest.” As his description continues we find that
the strength of him impressions amid the continuously changing scene
stupefies him. He is finding travel to be a powerful drug and he reflects on
the changes in perception that travel brings:
With an interest that hourly deepened as I read, I turned
the early pages of the enchanting romance of Italy.. . .
Those few brief days, as I look back on them, seem to me
the sweetest, fullest, calmest of my life. All personal
passions, all restless egotism, all worldly hopes, regrets,
and fears were stilled and absorbed in the steady
perception of the material present. (10)
The constant chatter o f the mind ceases as travel knocks Brooke out o f the
narrow definition of the self and he begins to perceive a larger environmental
self. Again, he writes, “My perception seemed for the first time to live a
sturdy creative life of its own” (11). Travel awakens Brooke into a creative
moment in which he is not bound by past expectations and disappointments;
rather, he perceives new possibilities and previously hidden strength.
James, however, is a qualified romantic, always feeling the pull of
“the real” and he cannot let such moments go unchallenged. While, in the
travel sketches he often pokes fun at his own pretensions as a traveler, in this
tale he has Brooke who buys into the popular notion of travel as liberation
only to have it, every now and then, slip away from him. While Brooke is
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generally lost in the romance of travel, James allows him moments in which
he questions the whole endeavor. Inside a cathedral Brooke reflects:
There came over me, too, a poignant conviction of the
ludicrous folly of the idle spirit of travel. How with
Murray and an opera-glass it strolls and stares where
omniscient angels stand diffident and sad! How blunted
and stupid are its senses! How trivial and superficial its
imaginings! To this builded sepulchre o f trembling hope
and dread, this monument of mighty passions, I had
wandered in search of pictorial effects. O vulgarity! Of
course I remained, nevertheless, still curious of effects.
With the self deprecation that is evident in his travel sketches, James writes
Brooke as the traveler that grows through experience on the road, then
momentarily questions this idea of growth, before finally falling back to his
original position. Brooke seemingly sees through the folly of his passions but
then, with the last sentence, reverses himself and becomes, once again, the
traveler he had despaired of being: he is, apparently, “still curious of effects.”
Brooke is on the verge of discovering that travel is not simply a matter of
going from here to there; he is beginning to notice some of the gaps amidst
the connections.
One complication of travel becomes evident in the conclusion of the
tale. Just as James challenges Brooke’s ideas about travel, he also undercuts
the reader’s understanding of Charlotte’s motivation. The reader is led to
believe the impediment to Brooke and Charlotte’s marriage is Brooke’s
unwillingness to settle down, that marriage will threaten his occupation as a
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traveler, but in the end we find that the true impediment is Charlotte’s father.
He suddenly dies o f an apoplectic stroke and she, without explanation decides
to marry Brooke suggesting that the original impediment was much ado about
nothing; the ghost in the machine turns out to be her father. Beneath the
surface of the plot, which dealt with Brooke and his passion for traveling, we
discover that the strength o f the father held sway. For James travel
represented movement toward something—new experiences, his heritage,
possibilities—but it also represented movement away from home and his own
dominating father. While the ending of “Travelling Companions” seems
abrupt and irrational, it makes sense when read with an eye towards James’s
biography because travel is both movement toward and movement away and
James appreciated the power of both. The movement out into the world helps
form the narrative but it is the things left behind which help fill in the
motivations of the characters. In James’s autobiographies he tries to fill in the
picture of the things left behind, but in his early tales such motivations are left
up to speculation. Charlotte’s father dies and that mysteriously clears the way
to her acceptance o f Brooke’s proposal.
While “Travelling Companions” introduced the traveler who is
illuminated and inspired in his travels, James’s next published tale, “A
Passionate Pilgrim” (1871), investigates the spaces between observer and
observed, between travelers and their destinations, shedding light on internal
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conflicts that might arise in the American tourist. This story, situated in
England, is told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator who observes
and then aids Clement Searle, a sickly destitute American. This American, as
the story opens, has just arrived in order to make a claim on the estate of his
distant relatives and the tale revolves around his attempt to make a connection
between what he sees as his heritage and his American self. While
“Travelling Companions” introduced the idea that a gap can develop between
the observer and the observed, this tale more fully investigates that
psychological gap. The irony is that as the traveler enters a country that is
apparently closer to his experience, England, the traveler more acutely feels
the lack of connection with that place. Years after leaving the United States
James would make England his home and “A Passionate Pilgrim” represents
his first attempt to reconcile his own American heritage with his life in
England.
As the story begins the narrator has just arrived in England from the
Continent and he quickly appreciates the difference such a change makes for
the American traveler. As in “Travelling Companions,” James immediately
identifies the narrator as a consumer of travel; on entering an inn the narrator
writes: “No sooner had I crossed the threshold of this apartment than I felt I
had mown the first swath in my golden-ripe crop of British impressions” (42).
He is, in the words of Mr. Brooke, ready to “do” England. But while he
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comes ready to consume he quickly notices a difference in his response to his
surroundings; he realizes that he has more invested in his appreciation of
England than he had invested in other places, that his response is deeply
influenced by his heritage:
The latent preparedness o f the American mind for even
the most delectable features of English life is a fact
which 1 never fairly probed to the depths. The roots of it
are so deeply buried in the virgin soil of our primary
culture, that, without some great upheaval of experience,
it would be hard to say exactly when and where and how
it begins. It makes an American’s enjoyment of England
an emotion more fatal and sacred than his enjoyment,
say, of Italy or Spain. (42-43)
While the narrator has little problem disassociating himself from the Italian or
Spanish scene, of being an objective observer, he is linguistically and
psychologically enmeshed in England. One can easily create a category of
“otherness” when one is in an obviously foreign country, where one cannot
even understand the language, but in England an American is in a peculiar
neutral space: half in-half out. Again, James points to future work, as he
would in his autobiographies try to put his finger on “exactly when and where
and how it begins,” but at this stage, more than thirty years earlier, he left the
origin of such sympathies unexplored.
But while the narrator recognizes his curious attitude towards England,
he remains, in many ways, a tourist and that colors his response. The primary
task o f the tourist, it seems, is to overcome that feeling of being a tourist, to
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break the awareness of otherness, and the narrator strives for such crack in the
wall that separates him from England. In the little village of Hampton Court,
at the entrance to Bushey Park, and intoxicated by a bottle of wine, the
narrator is, at last, able to tap into a feeling of belonging. He describes this
experience:
There is a rare emotion, familiar to every intelligent
traveler, in which the mind, with a great passionate throb,
asserts a magical synthesis of its impressions. You feel
England: you feel Italy! The sensation for the moment
stirs the innermost depths of your being. I had known it
from time to time in Italy, and had opened my soul to it
as to the spirit of the Lord. Since my arrival in England I
had been waiting for it to come. A bottle of excellent
Burgundy at dinner had perhaps unlocked to it the gates
of sense; it came now with a conquering tread. Just the
scene around me was the England of my visions. (52)
Here James, again, sells the idea that travel is emotionally and spiritually
fulfilling, that epiphanies are waiting for those who reach out for them,
although the mention of the “Burgundy” and the elevated tone—“spirit of the
Lord”—does make the situation somewhat comic. The narrator does show,
however, that the trick of the tourist is to be aware o f one’s personal vision
and then find the physical circumstances that support that vision. The
narrator seems to offer a healthy response towards travel as he searches out
such moments while at the same time knowing them to be crafted and
fleeting.
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The narrator is marvelously playful. At the beginning of the tale he
repositions himself at his supper so he can overhear Searle’s conversation
with his solicitor, and then he stealthily moves again to gain a visual image of
the speakers. To the narrator, Searle’s situation is intriguing and he creatively
forces Searle’s suit by secretly announcing their presence to Searle’s English
relatives. In an exchange with Miss Searle, the English cousin, the narrator
further defines his role as a playful instigator of the action, suggesting that
Miss Searle fall in love and marry Searle. The narrator addresses her,
‘Be a friend to him. Let him like you, let him
love you! You see in him now, doubtless, much to pity
and to wonder a t But let him simply enjoy awhile the
grateful sense of your nearness and dearness. He will be
a better and stronger man for it, and then you can love
him, you can respect him without restriction.’
Miss Searle listened with a puzzled tenderness of
gaze. ‘It’s a hard part for poor me to play!’
Her almost infantine gentleness left me no choice
but to be absolutely frank. ‘Did you ever play any part, at
all?’ I asked.
Her eyes met mine, wonderingly; she blushed, as
with a sudden sense of my meaning. ‘Never! I think I
have hardly lived.’
‘You’ve begun now, perhaps. You have begun to
care for something outside the narrow circle of habit and
duty. (Excuse me if I am rather too outspoken: you know
I’m a foreigner.) It’s a great moment: I wish you joy.’
(78-79)
Not only does the narrator create the vision of the two cousins becoming
betrothed but he reflects upon the power of travel. At home one is bound by
the “narrow circle of habit and duty,” but the foreigner can break that circle,
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and even at this premature time offer words of congratulation as if they are
already to be wed. The narrator is playing, as the writer does, with making
scenes and creating situations and even Miss Searle appreciates the craft in his
conversation; she responds, “I could almost fancy you are laughing at me. I
feel more trouble than joy” (79). The narrator is able to create situations and
epiphanies, and he remains a player, one who knows he has a part and takes
relish in performance.
The narrator has a healthy dose of self-deprecation while Searle, on
the other hand, represents an extreme example of one desperate for
acceptance, one who becomes a victim of the rhetoric of travel literature,
becoming unsure o f himself as either an American or an Englishman. Searle,
for instance, suffers from the idea that an American in Europe is little more
than a beggar asking for the table scraps from the superior European culture.
After being approached a beggar in Bushey Park, Searle proclaims, “I feel as
if I had seen my Doppelganger. . . he reminds me of myself. What am I but a
tramp?” Unlike the narrator whose nature is typically unruffled, Searle has
trouble identifying his position and in one scene recites what seems to be his
catechism; “‘Who am I?’ he said at last. ‘My name is Clement Searle. I was
bom in New York and in New York I have always lived. What am I? That’s
easily told. Nothing! I assure you, nothing’” (55). Even the perfection of the
English countryside serves only to make Searle’s pain the greater
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“What a perfect scene and background it forms!” Searle
when on. “What legends, what histories it knows! My
heart is breaking with unutterable visions. There’s
Tennyson’s Talking Oak. What summer days one could
spend here! How I could lounge my bit o f life away on
this shady stretch of turf. Haven’t I some maiden-cousin
in yon moated grange who would give me kind leave?”
And then turning almost fiercely upon me: “Why did you
bring me here? Why did you drag me into this torment of
vain regrets?” (62)
The “passionate pilgrim,” Searle, is tom between his desire to belong in
England and his knowledge that he has no claim upon England. Even the
English cousin, Mr. Searle, plays to Searle’s feeling of inadequacy as he
questions, “Who are you, what are you? From what paradise of fools do you
come, that you fancy I shall cut off a piece of my land, my home, my heart, to
toss to you?” (84).
Searle arrives in England with a feeling of inadequacy; he is sick,
dying of an unnamed illness, and hoping to make a claim upon his ancestor’s
home. In such a condition Searle finally is overcome as a traveler and he
begins to imagine that he js his ancestor, Clement Searle, who sailed for
America. Walking around his ancestor’s school, Oxford, Searle begins to
speak in the first person, as if he had been a student there. The narrator
writes, “My friend’s whole being, indeed, seemed now more and more to
tremble with the racking act of vision; and if I had been asked on what sole
condition his life might be prolonged, I would have said on that of sudden
blindness” (91). The “passionate pilgrim” is absorbed by his double, the
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English ancestor. Ironically, as Searle’s personality is consumed by this early
immigrant to America, he begins to take a more American tone. He tells a
down-and-out Englishman, “It lies neither in one’s chance nor one’s start to
make one a success; nor in anything one’s brother can do or can undo. It lies
in one’s will!” (97). And although Searle has not long to live, he is
instrumental in helping this poor man, Mr. Rawson, get the money together to
emigrate to the United States. On his death bed, Searle tells Mr. Rawson:
“My friend... there is to be one American the less. Let there be one the
more. At the worst, you’ll be as good a one as I” (99).
In the character o f Searle, James seems to be mapping out one type of
response to travel. Whether travel is salubrious or not depends on the attitude
the traveler brings with him or her. The narrator treats travel as an
opportunity for play and therefore is enhanced in the experience, but Searle,
who desperately depends on making a connection with England deteriorates
both physically and mentally. He puts all his stock in a final trip to England
and is left bankrupt. He is able to help Rawson, and that may represent a final
moment of lucidity, but by that time he is too far gone, physically at least, to
make a comeback. It is not hard to put the finger on where James’s
sympathies lie, as he apparently favors the detached tourism of the narrator
over the misguided passion of Searle. The narrator has the creativity to live
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wherever he is and to manipulate the scene so that it matches his imagination
while Searle is caught in the power of forces over which he has no control.
2
In James’s tales the reader is often confronted with competing
interpretations of the meaning of travel; James investigates various aspects o f
travel, wondering how the world is different for an American, for an
European, for an American who has been Europeanized or for a young
American girl on her first trip abroad. He shows in “A Passionate Pilgrim”
the contrast between the narrator, who takes his travel with a grain of salt, and
Searle, who expects too much, and James seems to prefer the former. But as
James continued to travel for the next eight years he began to let more
ambiguity slip into his tales and with the publication of “Daisy Miller: A
Study” (1878) James takes ambiguity to another level, creating, in a short
space, characters who portray wonderfully complex representations of
travelers. In the characters of Winterboume and Daisy Miller we see a
conflict between the Europeanized American and the young American girl on
her first trip abroad and although they are distinctly drawn, both the unnamed
narrator and the reader are left with unanswered questions regarding these two
travelers.
The reader first meets the narrator who, without becoming an actor in
the tale, plays the crucial role of observer and reporter. Although James had
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professed that he was “weary of writing articles about places,” the first
paragraph of “Daisy Miller” taps into his travel experience, and, as in
“Travelling Companions,” the narration begins with what could be an excerpt
from a travel guide: “At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a
particularly comfortable hotel” (154). Unlike “A Passionate Pilgrim,”
however, in which the narrator begins by discussing his emotional response to
the English scene and then manipulates the situation in order to become
involved in the story, the narrator of “Daisy Miller” remains a detached,
uninvolved observer. Like a good reporter, the narrator does not pretend to
know more than what can be observed or overheard and frequently lets the
reader in on the limitations of his knowledge. The second paragraph
introduces the protagonist, Winterboume, and he is presented through
physical descriptions and through reports o f what others have said about him.
The narrator begins by establishing a sense of distance between himself and
Winterboume, “I hardly know whether it was the analogies or the differences
that were uppermost in the mind of a young American, who, two or three
years ago, sat in the garden of the ‘Trois Couronnes,’ looking about him,
rather idly, at some of the graceful objects I have mentioned” (155). The
narrator can only guess at the contents of Winterboume’s mind, and there is
also an indeterminate distance of time, “two or three years,” that affects the
account.
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Such narration complicates the presentation o f the characters, but the
case become even more complex with the character o f Winterboume because
he spends the tale in a hermeneutic quest of his own; he tries to understand
the character of Daisy Miller. Like the narrator, Winterboume straggles with
competing interpretations, and when these interpretations are piled upon the
narrator’s lack of certainty, the reader is faced with a thick layer of
supposition to dig through. But the narrator and Winterboume encounter
different problems in their attempts at interpretation. While the narrator is
faced with problems o f interpretation that cannot be overcome, such as not
being able to read another’s thoughts, Winterboume’s judgment is clouded by
his own lack of insight. The successful traveler will see what is in front of
him or her and respond appropriately, but Winterboume, supposedly because
he has stayed too long in Europe, has lost his ability to clearly perceive his
surroundings. For instance, immediately after the narrator describes Daisy as
“strikingly, admirably pretty,” Winterboume thinks, “How pretty they are”
(157). His first response is to place her in a category, supposedly one of
“American girls.” While the narrator describes her as an individual,
Winterboume obliterates her individuality and sees her as a type. And when
he interacts with Daisy he continuously makes mental reference to ideas he
has adopted regarding the conventions of proper behavior. Daisy’s behavior
and their status as travelers cause him to challenge those conventions but,
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nonetheless, he has to reason it out: “in Geneva, as he had been perfectly
aware, a young man was not at liberty to speak to a young unmarried lady
except under certain rarely-occurring conditions; but here at Vevey, what
conditions could be better than these?—a pretty American girl coming and
standing in front of you in a garden” (157). Winterboume has an inkling that
travel opens the door to creativity and play, but throughout the tale, and
especially in the conclusion, he is stifled by his options, incapable of acting.
The reason for Winterboume’s failure to interpret Daisy Miller is
invariably that he has traveled too much and been away from America too
long. Winterboume is the first to propose this theory: “He felt that he had
lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good deal; he had become
dishabituated to the American tone” (161). Soon after, Winterboume’s aunt
supports this theory: “You have lived too long out of the country. You will be
sure to make some great mistake. You are too innocent” (166). After Daisy
spurns Mrs. Walker to continue her walk by the Pincian Garden he once again
relies upon this theory: “I suspect, Mrs. Walker, that you and I have lived too
long at Geneva!” (187). The implication is that through travel they have
become sophisticated beyond measure, unable to sympathize with the
uncultured American. The conflict is wrought between the cosmopolitan
set—Winterboume, his aunt, and Mrs. Walker—and the unruly Millers.
Winterboume, at times, adopts Mrs. Costello’s perspective, and thinks Daisy
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“too provincial” (195) and common, although he also has times when he
questions his perspective: “He had assented to the idea that she was
‘common,’ but was she so, after all, or was he simply getting used to her
commonness?” (174).
But while Winterboume debates Daisy’s provinciality, the true
provinciality lies in himself and his crowd. Winterboume “had imbibed at
Geneva the idea that one must always be attentive to one’s aunt” (164) and
this attention thwarts his ability to see his surroundings clearly. James
presents Winterboume’s aunt, Mrs. Costello, as one who carries around New
York society wherever she goes. Mrs. Costello had described this society to
Winterboume: “She admitted that she was very exclusive; but, if he were
acquainted with New York, he would see that one had to be. And her picture
of the minutely hierarchical constitution of the society of that city, which she
presented to him in many different lights, was, to Winterboume’s
imagination, almost oppressively striking” (164).
Winterboume thinks he is able to stand aside from her world and
judge it “oppressive,” but he is, unconsciously, enmeshed in her world. For
instance, Mrs. Costello is the first to pass judgment upon the Millers—
although her statements are somewhat opaque, suggesting that Daisy “goes on
from day to day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age. I can
imagine nothing more vulgar” (193)—and Winterboume is easily swayed by
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her opinions. After seeing Daisy and Giovanelli disappear beneath a parasol
he shows his allegiance to the old woman: “This young man lingered a
moment, then he began to walk. But he walked—not towards the couple with
the parasol; towards the residence o f his aunt, Mrs. Costello” (188). When he
finally makes up his mind about Daisy it is only to confirm his Aunt’s ideas:
“It was as if a sudden illumination had been flashed upon the ambiguity of
Daisy’s behaviour and the riddle had become easy to read. She was a young
lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect” (198). Even
after Daisy’s death, Winterboume cannot step off the train of thought he is
riding and recognize the root of his problem, which he still mistakenly
identifies as living “too long in foreign parts” (202). Whereas these tourists
think they have traveled too much, they do not travel at all; they have not
interacted with the outside world. Instead, they have carefully packed all their
preconceived notions about life, living too much within their own
“oppressively striking” society no matter where they are.
While Winterboume and his set have stayed too long in Europe, losing
the ability to appreciate the rewards o f travel, the Millers, in Europe for the
first time, represent travelers of a different sort, and while they are set up
against Winterboume’s crowd they do not necessarily represent a positive
alternative in the ambiguous world of “Daisy Miller.” The boy, Randolph, for
instance, does not care for Europe, he misses his American candy and liked
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nothing so much as The City of Richmond, the ship they arrived on—“only it
was turned the wrong way.” But the most hard put traveler is Daisy’s mother
who is afraid she might tire of castles. She explains to Winterboume her
reluctance to visit the castle in Vevey: “Of course Daisy—she wants to go
round. But there’s a lady here—I don’t know her name—she says she
shouldn’t think we’d want to go to see castles here: she should think we’d
want to wait till we got to Italy. It seems as if there would be so many more
there” (170). Mrs. Miller is prepared to take testimonials from women she
does not know in order to refrain from needless exertion. And when she
meets Winterboume in Rome she expresses her disappointed with that city:
“We had been led to expect something different” (178).
Daisy, on the other hand, although not the most intelligent traveler—
she does not even know by what route they are going to Italy—does have an
exuberance and passion for travel. Just as Winterboume has difficulty
understanding Daisy, so does the reader; the contemporary and subsequent
critical response reflects the complexity of her character. As Leon Edel
reports, James’s contemporary audience was partial to Daisy: “Daisy was
distinctly liked by many American readers . . . she became a perennial
figure—and ‘a Daisy Miller’ was to be a much-used descriptive phrase
whenever some particularly charming, forward young lady from America
showed up in Continental surroundings” (217). On the other hand, William
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Stowe argues that Daisy is an admonitory character, vulgar and
undereducated, that she cares more about purchasing than about having
anything to do with culture (182). Stowe’s case, which challenges Edel’s
well-documented position, is also well supported and simply adds to the
complexity of her character, which seems to display the best and the worst
elements of American culture.
Yet, besides displaying American characteristics Daisy also represents
the person closest to the artist in this tale; she, more than the other characters,
shows an appreciation for the opportunities travel offers. Her mother, brother
and the various women they meet seem to experience travel as a burden,
something that induces headaches, while Daisy expresses enthusiasm for her
opportunities. Even though her concerns may seem slight she expresses them
with tremendous energy. About her stay in Rome, she says:
We’ve got splendid rooms at the hotel; Eugenio says
they’re the best rooms in Rome. We are going to stay all
winter—if we don’t die of the fever; and I guess we’ll
stay then. It’s a great deal nicer than I thought; I thought
it would be fearfully quiet; I was sure it would be awfully
poky. I was sure we should be going round all the time
with one of those dreadful old men that explain about the
pictures and things. But we only had about a week of
that, and now I’m enjoying myself. (182)
It is Daisy’s fault that she does not care for “pictures and things” but, at the
same time, she does know how to enjoy herself. For instance, Daisy is able to
play with scenes and, in her words, create “a fuss” (172), just as James had
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seen his French cousin Marie do when he was a boy (A Small Bov 107). The
contrast develops between the naive Daisy and the jaded Winterboume and
both end up participants in a tragedy. Daisy lacks the sense to stay out of the
malaria inducing Coliseum and Winterboume cannot see that his affection
would have been appreciated by Daisy. Unlike “A Passionate Pilgrim,”
“Daisy Miller” makes the choice of sympathies complicated as the tragedy is
built upon two ambiguous travelers. The contrast is not between Daisy and
Europe but between Daisy and a different type o f American traveler, the
traveler who packs not only the appropriate wardrobe, but all of his or her
provincial ideas and prejudices as well.
3
During his first two decades as a writer o f tales James frequently
worked the mine of his European travels digging out plots and scenes.
Following “Daisy Miller” he wrote “An International Episode” (1878-9)
which focuses on the relationship between an American girl among the British
and even in his later years he focused on an American family’s obsession with
travel in “Europe” (1899), but the greater share o f James’s later tales are
marked by a different type of excavation. James always wrote with an
appreciation of psychology, but as he aged he focused less on the concrete
description of places and more on the psychology o f travel. One story that
explores imaginative spaces, and takes up travel as a figure, is the strange—or
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as James referred to it, “queer”—tale, “The Great Good Place” (1900). This
tale is an enigmatic dream vision which Leon Edel refers to as “James’s desire
for an exclusive man’s world, a monastic Order, a sheltering Brotherhood”
(474), although describing the theme as “homo-social” is to understate the
homo-erotic suggestiveness of the story. That the theme of “The Great Good
Place” could prove disagreeable to readers is shown by James’s fancy
footwork in the preface to the tale in the New York Edition o f his works.
While he comments at length on the other tales in volume XVI, he excuses
himself from commenting upon this tale: “There remains ‘The Great Good
Place’ (1900)~to the spirit of which, however, it strikes me, any gloss or
comment would be a tactless challenge” (ix). The tale is deemed important
enough to include in the collection, so the lack of tact cannot be an admission
of inferiority. Rather there is something in the tale that would render an
explanation less than socially appropriate. Clearly there is a gap between the
inner meaning of the tale and what James is prepared to say outwardly about
it.
Such a gap between inner and outer worlds and how to reconcile them
is the central concern in “The Great Good Place.” The protagonist, George
Dane, is one who feels too much with the world; he is faced with the external
pressures and demands that accompany success and his creative juices are
barely flowing. The third person narrator describes the friction between what
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the world sees and what Dane experiences: “Could anything be more ‘right,’
in the view of the envious world, than everything that surrounds us here; that
immense array of letters, notes, circulars; that pile of printers’ proofs,
magazines and books; these perpetual telegrams, these impending guests; this
retarded, unfinished and interminable work?” (155). What is right with the
world—work and success—is wrong with the writer. He imagines running
away and when his servant, Brown, asks “where?” he replies with a quotation
“There is a happy land—far, far away!” (155). But, Dane’s childish wish for
escape conflicts with his mature impression that there is no escape: “There
was no footing on which a man who had ever liked life—liked it, at any rate,
as he had—could now escape from it” (153). This impression is succeeded by
a wish that the rain outside might create a flood that would carry his
responsibilities “away on its bosom.” But again he checks himself: “Yet he
could at last only turn back from the window; the world was everywhere,
without and within, and, with the great staring egotism of its health and
strength, was not to be trusted for tact or delicacy” (153).
Into this troubled world comes a young man with whom Dane has an
enigmatic encounter. As they meet Dane acknowledges his own “disposition
not to touch—no not with the finger. Ah, if he might never again touch!” but
ends up shaking of his visitor’s hand: “Thus indeed, if he had wanted never
again to touch, it was already done” (157). This strange encounter, seemingly
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a s tr u g g le between inner and outer worlds, leads to a dream vision; the next
thing Dane is aware of is that he is someplace else, and the shift in the
narrative is abrupt: “He might have been a week in the place—the scene of his
new consciousness—before he spoke at all.” Dane awakens in this new world
and is quickly aware that the place has a “charm,” although the specifics of
that charm proved difficult to pin down: “What was the general charm? He
couldn’t, for that matter, easily have phrased it; it was such an abyss o f
negatives, such an absence of everything” (157). But while the environment
is marked by absence he does find one notable aspect, a “Brother” who was
remarkably similar to himself. Also remarkable is the feeling o f security that
the environment creates in Dane: “It was a conscious security. It was
wonderful! Dane had lived into it, but he was still immensely aware. He
would have been sorry to lose that, for just this fact, as yet, the blessed fact of
consciousness, seemed the greatest thing of all” (158).
Dane is conscious of his surroundings and he wants to pin down his
location to a more specific place so he begins to puzzle out his location. At
first the part monastery-part spa reminds him of places he had seen in “Italy,
in old days, seen in old cities, old convents, old villas,” and while “some great
abode of an Order. . . was his main term of comparison,” his comparison is
finally unsatisfactory (158). Dane also enlists the aid of his Brother, asking:
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“Where is it?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised if it were much nearer than
one ever suspected.”
“Nearer town, do you mean?”
“Nearer everything—nearer everyone.”
George Dane thought. “Somewhere, for instance,
down in Surrey?” (160)
When Dane tries to situate himself in relation to an actual town he seems
particularly dense, but he comes closer to insight when he changes the
question from “Where is it?” to “What is it?”:
“I know what I call it,” said Dane after a moment.
Then as his friend listened with interest: “Just simply
‘The Great Good Place.’”
“I see—what can you say more? I’ve put it to myself
perhaps a little differently.” They sat there as innocently
as small boys confiding to each other the names of toy
animals. “The Great Want Met.”
“Ah, yes, that’s it!”
Through negotiation the two Brothers find a definition of the place that shifts
the emphasis from the place—“The Great Good Place”—onto the traveler, the
person whose desire—“The Great Want”—creates and inhabits the place.
Dane is a traveler who reaches a destination that cannot be clearly mapped
and this situation is best described with reference to the world of children
“confiding to each other the names of toy animals.” As the Christians say,
“God gave names to all the animals,” and although the scale is smaller—they
are only dealing with toys—the names children create are also intimate and
magical; such names help to animate the child’s surroundings. James is
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reaching back to grasp at the spaces from which creativity flows, from which
something comes from nothing.
Throughout this tale of self-discovery, James continues the travel
theme, as Dane continues the process of trying to place himself, although he
typically does so humorously, without displaying his prior sense of
compulsion: “He cultivated, however, but vaguely, the question of where he
was, finding it near enough the mark to be almost sure that if he was not in
Kent he was probably in Hampshire” (167). The earlier tales began with a
place, beginning often with sentences that seem transcribed from travel
guides, and James inhabited that space with characters, but “The Great Good
Place” begins with the character, Dane, around whom James attempts to build
a healing, creative space. Part of this reversal of the travel theme is that
instead of leaving for the salubrious southern climate, Dane and his brothers
find a way to create a “sense of the south” where they are:
“Leave people alone, at all events, and the air is what
they take to. Into the closed and the stuffy they have to
be driven. I’ve had, too—I think we must all have—a
fond sense o f the south.”
“But imagine it,” said Dane, laughing, “in the beloved
British islands and so near as we are to Bradford!” (172)
The attempt to pin down their location becomes a joke to the Brothers and the
undercurrent of uncertainty remains. They cannot name the place or the
experience—“It was the thing they never named—partly for want of the need
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and partly for lack of the word” (166)— yet, they provide provocative
descriptions of it:
“It’s a sort of kindergarten!”
“The next thing you’ll be saying that we’re babes at
the breast!”
“Of some great mild, invisible mother who stretches
away into space and whose lap is the whole valley— ?”
“And her bosom”—Dane completed the figure—“the
noble eminence of our hill? That will do; anything will
do that covers the essential fact.”
“And what do you call the essential fact?”
“Why, that—as in old days on Swiss lake-sides—
we’re en pension.” (173)
Finally “The Great Good Place” is located both in the experiences of the
infant at the mother’s breast and in the traveler; both are places of creative
power as the child feels hunger and is satisfied and the traveler is free to
disburden him or herself of the expectations and responsibilities of the home.
Particularly noteworthy in James’s vision is that it refuses to be solely
interior, but continually reaches out to touch the world. In an article on “The
Great Good Place,” William McMurray identifies Dane’s implication in the
creation of the world he inhabits:
Dane’s recovered inner life and his rediscovery of the
actual world are thus brought together at last. Reality,
James’s story implies, is not something given and
independent of man. Rather it is something created in
experience, and man is the creator. It is this discovery
finally that enables Dane at the last to see, as he rises
from his couch and looks in his room that it “seemed
disencumbered, different, twice as large. It was all
right.” (83)
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While Dane’s dream vision does change the world, it represents more than the
simple idea that we each create our world; he refuses to give up the idea that
reality is felt in the interplay o f inner and outer spaces. Dane does not retreat
into the world of Kubla Khan, losing himself in the vision, but with his
presence of mind, exhibited in the interchanges between himself and his
“brothers,” he continues to keep one foot in the world. He not only leaves the
dream to return to his room, his responsibilities, and his life, but throughout
the dream he continues to try and touch the world, to name the “Great Good
Place.” And finally, through this encounter with playful spaces—images of
childhood and travel—Dane reenters his study and sees it as larger and
“disencumbered”; once again his life is filled with possibilities instead of just
work.
As “The Great Good Place” suggests, James’s later writings are less
concerned with what he called the picturesque. After seeing Europe, James
did not seek out more exotic terrain, he did not go to Hong Kong or Beirut,
but rather turned inward and his travels turned toward investigating his
psychological roots. In The American Scene (19031. James writes about his
travels back to America and in one of his last short stories, “The Jolly Comer”
(1908), he investigates the psychological aspects of such a return. This tale,
somewhat of a ghost story, deals with Spencer Brydon’s intimation that he
would have been much different if he had remained and grown where he was
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planted, in other words, if he had not been a traveler. “The Jolly Comer”
becomes, at least in Brydon’s quest, an anti-travel narrative, although at the
end of the tale Brydon will again gain an appreciation of his traveling life.
That Spencer Brydon had been raised on “Europe,” is seen through
contrast with his American friend, Alice Staverton. Although she is his
closest confidant during his stay in the United States, and she is someone of
his age, there is a difference in their worldly experiences:
They had communities of knowledge, “their” knowledge
(this discriminating possessive was always on her lips) of
presences of the other age, presences all overlaid, in his
case, by the experience o f a man and the freedom of a
wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages
of life that were strange and dim to her, just by “Europe”
in short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished,
under that pious visitation of the spirit from which she
had never been diverted. (700)
While they share much in common, Brydon’s experience as a traveler sets him
apart. Part of the difference is sexual; a man had more opportunities and, at
least in her estimation, a greater inclination to wander. Subsequently, a man
was much more likely to be intoxicated by “Europe.” Yet, Miss Staverton
suspects there remains something of the American in him. He remains “still
exposed and cherished” by the same spirit that informs her. Staverton’s
speculations lead her to question what Brydon might have been if he had not
caught the traveling bug, a question that takes root and grows in Biydon’s
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mind as well; he becomes obsessed with encountering the ghost of his
American self, a ghost that haunts his old house on the jolly comer.
At first, Brydon suspects that traveling to America is not so different
from traveling elsewhere. After being in Europe for so long, travel as an
evocative, creative endeavor works in reverse and Brydon is fueled by images
of America. He is ready to be pleased: “Everything was somehow a surprise;
and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected
everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for play” (697). But
America does not surprise in the way Brydon expects; he finds “charm” in
things he had earlier thought ugly and he experiences dismay when
encountering “the modem, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had
more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come
over to see” (698). This disappointment, coupled with the question raised by
Miss Staverton, interrupts the travel narrative and Brydon gets caught up in
the monomaniacal quest to discover what he might have been if he had not
left America: “He found all things come back to the question of what he
personally might have been, how he might have led his life and ‘turned out,’ if
he had not so, at the outset, given it up” (706). Brydon works himself into a
frenzy with this question and begins to pursue the theory that travel is a not a
creative occupation, that it has stultified the growth of his true self:
Not to have followed my perverse young course—and
almost in the teeth of my father’s curse, as I may say; not
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to have kept it up, so, ‘over there,’ from that day to this,
without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to have liked it,
to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an
abysmal conceit of my own preference: some variation
from that. I say, must have produced some different
effect for my life and for my ‘form.’ . . . it’s only a
question o f what fantastic, yet perfectly possible,
development of my own nature I mayn’t have missed. It
comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep
down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is
in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course, I
just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him for
once and for ever. (706-7)
Brydon’s image of travel has turned back on itself to reflect his father’s
prejudice against it. He reverses the image of travel as an element of his
growth, calling it a “blight” on the “full-blown flower” of his American self.
Earlier tales present travel as an opportunity for creative play in which
characters might discover themselves in new surroundings, but “The Jolly
Comer” pursues an anti-travel narrative. All of Brydon’s creativity is engaged
in imagining that he had never left home. No longer is Brydon engaged with
the world; he becomes lost in a deepening nostalgia:
He projected himself all day, in thought, straight over the
bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the
other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he
had heard behind him the click of his great house-door,
began for him, on the jolly comer, as beguilingly as the
slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of
the conductor’s wand. (710)
On one level he seems to be engaged in a creative endeavor—the orchestra
seems ready to play—but Brydon is only fooling himself and the images he
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creates are finally pathetic. Besides the orchestral image, he imagines the
house as a crystal bowl: “The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical
other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there,
the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled
forsworn possibilities” (711). Instead of the excitement of travel, Brydon is
experiencing a pathological obsession; the band does not break into a playful
piece of music, but instead Brydon hears the “pathetic wail” o f the crystal.
The climax to the tale comes as Brydon finally encounters the
apparition he has been stalking. This encounter is initiated when Brydon is
dismayed by a door that seemingly closed itself. Brydon’s old home becomes
animated and as in the ending of “The Great Good Place” his surroundings are
enlarged, but this time with a difference:
The house, withal, seemed immense, the scale o f space
again inordinate; the open rooms, to no one of which his
eyes deflected, gloomed in their shuttered state like
mouths of caverns; only the high skylight that formed the
crown of the deep well created for him a medium in
which he could advance, but which might have been, for
queemess of colour, some watery under-world. (722-3)
He encounters space but instead of being comforted—as is Dane in “The
Great Good Place”—Brydon finds it terrifying and monstrous. While one
door was closed, another seemed to open itself, and his grasp on reality
apparently breaks. Again the ideology o f travel—that it presents “expansion”
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and “play”—seems to run amok as the doors open and close, and the room
expands and contracts:
Out of that again the question sprang at him, making his
eyes, as he felt, half-start from his head, as they had done,
at the top of the house, before the sign of the other door.
If he had left that one open, hadn’t he left this one closed,
and wasn’t he now in most immediate presence o f some
inconceivable occult activity? It was as sharp, the
question, as a knife in his side, but the answer hung fire
still and seemed to lose itself in the vague darkness to
which the thin admitted dawn, glimmering archwise over
the whole outer door, make a semicircular margin, a cold
silvery nimbus that seemed to play a little as he looked—
to shift and expand and contract. (723-724)
Out of this unstable scene, the apparition becomes clearer and Brydon finally
beholds the object of his desire, the image of himself as he would have been
had he stayed in America:
He saw, in its great grey glimmering margin, the central
vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking the very
form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his
curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was
something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal
presence. (724)
The image of his alter-ego is acute and detailed, but it is noteworthy mostly
for its monstrousity. Brydon notices that the apparition is missing two fingers,
“which were reduced to stumps, as if accidentally shot away” (725) and when
he finally sees the face he finds that the horror is not so much the apparition
as it is the quest he had been on: “He had been ‘sold,’ he inwardly moaned,
stalking such game as this: a horror, but the waste of his nights had been only
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grotesque and the success of his adventure an irony. Such an identity fitted
his at no point, made its alternative monstrous” (725). The apparition—
“unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility”—shows
Brydon the folly of trying to undo the past.
James’s early travel sketches led the way for his short fiction and both
genres suggest that travel can be a creative experience. Characters like Searle
in “A Passionate Pilgrim” and Winterboume in “Daisy Miller” who fail to
adjust to the reality that confronts them fail to experience the potential
benefits of travel. Brydon, like these earlier characters, is also unable to
adjust to reality and becomes lost in an insane desire to reverse the past.
Fortunately, Brydon collapses and awakes with a strange intelligence, feeling
as if he had been dreaming:
It had brought him to knowledge, to knowledge—yes,
this was the beauty of his state; which came to resemble
more and more that o f a man who has gone to sleep on
some news of a great inheritance, and then, afier
dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strange
to it, has waked up again to serenity of certitude and has
only to lie and watch it grow. (726-727)
The episode on the jolly comer turns out to be a nightmare, a momentary
break in which nostalgia takes the place of sanity. While longing to reverse
the past, Spencer Brydon perceived his European life as a crippling of his true
self, but then in the vision of the mangled hand he realizes that it would have
been more crippling to stay. Brydon is glad to awaken from the question of
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“what if?” recognizing that his great inheritance is his travelling life, a life
that continues, even on his native soil, to pay dividends.
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Notes
1 See “Henry James, or The Merchant of Europe” in Stowe.
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Chapter Five
The Mild Adventure:
Travel in Henry James’ Novels
The world is a book, and those who do not
travel read only a page.
Saint Augustine
You may depend upon it that there are things
going on inside o f us that we understand
mighty little about.
Christoper Newman in The American
“Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell you o f what he has been
conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless freedom and
his ‘moral’ reference,” James writes in the preface to the New York edition of
The Portrait of a Lady, expressing much about his attitude towards creativity.
In this quotation, James creates an image that is suggestive of Winnicott’s
description of the child playing in the presence of the mother. Both images
are paradoxical, expressing, at once, expansion and contraction, of moving
away and being pulled back. The child feels his or her freedom in the
boundary set by the mother’s presence, forming a potential space in which the
child feels safe enough to be creative. The artist, James suggests, is not much
different, being able to play, hence the experience o f “boundless freedom,”
while in the presence o f the mother, his “‘moral’ reference.” James considers
this feeling of expansion and contraction as central to what an artist is; the
only question is how the artist comes to that feeling, or, in other words: “of
what he has been conscious.”
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Consciousness, for James, is related to travel. Much has been written
about James’s expatriate characters, so much so that to say that the characters
of James’s novels are “travelers” may seem trite, but in the world of James’s
novels this designation cannot be avoided; it is an integral element in
understanding the psychology of the characters. As James suggests in his
autobiographies, he became conscious of himself in Europe, of himself as a
traveler, and he translates this awareness into the characters in his novels.
James’s travels were much like the Isabel Archer’s in The Portrait of a Ladv: a
“mild adventure” (“Preface” xx). This phrase, like the “boundless freedom”
and the “moral reference,” is a paradoxical image of a free, yet safe, arena in
which James’s protagonist could develop. Europe offered the experience, in
Winnicott’s words, of “playing and reality”: the opportunity to allow inner
worlds to develop within the security of sensed boundaries, far enough away
from his family to feel independent, though not far enough away to feel alone
and estranged. In the novels, James creates characters that embody these
psychological ideas about the relationship between inner and outer worlds and
between personal development and independence. Although travel plays a
role in most of his twenty novels, three of James’s novels are particularly
helpful in developing the relationship between travel and creativity: The
American (1877), The Portrait of a Ladv (1881) and The Ambassadors (1903).
Each of these novels show a further elaboration on the theme of the
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conscientious traveler, creating distinctions between, at once, the inward and
outward travelling of the protagonists and their travelling companions who
seem, more often than not, to be scratching at the surface of things.
1
In the preface to The American, which James wrote for the New York
edition in 1907 (thirty years after the original publication of the novel), James
reflects back on the composition of the novel, revealing much about his
attitudes towards travel and creativity. While some o f James’ prefaces are
purposefully opaque—as in the preface to “The Great Good Place”—the
preface to The American is particularly helpful in understanding the genesis
of this novel, which James claims originated in an American “horse-car.”
Remarkably, the novel is given a history similar to that of James, the artist. In
the autobiographies, James clearly considers his psychological roots as
planted in the United States, roots that were watered, fed and brought to
blossom in Europe. In a similar way, James presents the germination of the
novel; it was planted in American soil, but lay dormant until brought to life in
Europe. James attributes this dormancy to the novel’s potential; he thought
the idea too ripe with possibilities to be taken up while in America:
I was charmed with my idea, which would take, however,
much working out and precisely because it had so much
to give, I think, must I have dropped it for the time into
the deep well of unconscious cerebration: not without the
hope, doubtless, that it might eventually emerge from that
reservoir, as one had already known the buried treasure to
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come to light, with a firm iridescent surface and a notable
increase of weight, (vii)
James had, at an early point in his career, apparently learned to trust his
“reservoir” to lay bare its “buried treasure” at the right moment and in the
right climate for optimal growth. As James looks back, he is not completely
pleased with the original version o f the novel—he feels that the Bellegardes
could have been more realistically rendered—but he is nearly in awe of his
early ability to trust his creative instincts: “I lose myself at this late hour, I am
bound to add, in a certain sad envy of the free play of so much unchallenged
instinct” (x).
After putting the idea for the novel aside, James picked it up again
when he took up residence in Paris in the winter of 1875. Several factors
seem to have been at play in James’s motivations for beginning the novel. At
that time, James was struggling to create his own identity, both intellectually
and financially and, as his biographers also point out, when he arrived in
Paris, he was in particular need o f funds; only through publication of a novel
could he hope to earn financial independence from his father.1 The money
from James’ first published novel, Roderick Hudson, went toward paying
back money borrowed from Henry James Sr.; the money from The American
would keep James in Europe for the following year (Edel 194-5). Yet James,
in the preface, does not consider such practical affairs, instead speculating on
less apparent motivations for the novel’s inception. In retrospect, the renewal
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of the idea takes on a mystical tint: “The resurrection then took place in Paris,
where I was at the moment living, and in December, 1875; my good fortune
being apparently that Paris had ever so promptly offered me, and with an
immediate directness at which I now marvel,. . . everything that was needed
to make my conception concrete” (vii-viii). But while Paris offered concrete
detail, detail alone would only render a travel sketch; while his early career
consisted of travel essays and tales that frequently read like travel sketches,
James was determined to make the novel distinct.
Part of what James finds marvelous about the writing of The American
is that he was able to write in and about Paris, maintaining a well-focused
narrative even in the midst o f its distractions. In the preface, James suggests
that writing while living in the setting of one’s subject can create an
overpowering impression that can obscure the narrative:
I have ever, in general, found it difficult to write of places
under too immediate an impression—the impression that
prevents standing off and allows neither space nor time
for perspective. The image has had for the most part to
be dim if the reflexion was to be, as is proper for a
reflexion, both sharp and quiet: one has a horror, I think,
artistically, o f agitated reflexions, (xi)
But while Paris offered distractions, immersion in its environment also had its
rewards in terms of inspiration:
I have but to re-read ten lines to recall my daily effort not
to waste time in hanging over the window-bar for a sight
of the cavalry the hard music of whose hoofs so directly
and thrillingly appealed; an effort that inveterately
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failed—and a trivial circumstance now dignified, to my
imagination, I may add, by the fact that the fruits of this
weakness, the various items of the vivid picture, so
constantly recaptured, must have been in themselves
suggestive and inspiring, must have been rich strains, in
their way, of the great Paris harmony, (xi)
James is not prepared to say that the Parisian scene directly influenced his
novel, because, after all, he had the travel sketches to deal with the subject of
the traveler’s impressions; rather, the scene had a “suggestive and inspiring”
quality. James is intent in stressing his independence from his social milieu
and even claims that the novel’s strength comes out of his need to ignore the
influence of the Parisian scene: “Perhaps that is why the novel, after all, was
to achieve, as it went on, no great—certainly no very direct—transfusion of
the immense overhanging presence. It had to save as it could its own life, to
keep tight hold of the tenuous silver thread, the one hope for which was that it
shouldn’t be tangled or clipped” (xii).
The “silver thread” is a recurring image in James’s writings, and while
the preceding quotation refers to the life of his novel, it also reflects on
James’ psychological state at the time. Unlike Roderick Hudson, which was
begun in Europe but finished in his father’s house on Quincy Street in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, The American was to mark his liberation from the
influence of his family. Leon Edel writes, “Roderick Hudson had represented
James’ final dialogue with Quincy Street, a last tug at the silver cord. He had
made his choice, and his story of Christopher Newman was symbolic of his
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own stepping-forth into the world—as a new man” (199). James did interpret
the composition of The American as a significant event in his growth as an
artist and as he looked back he tried to preserve the image of the novel’s
compositional integrity. Although he denies that the French scene had any
direct effect on the novel, James, who cannot remember with absolute
accuracy, feels that the novel must have been finished before he went to
London in December o f 1876: “I was to pass over to London that autumn,
which was a reason the more for considering the matter—the matter of
Newman’s final predicament—with due intensity: to let a loose end dangle
over into alien air would so fix upon the whole, I strenuously felt, the
dishonour of piecemeal composition” (xii). But, despite James’ feeling that
an “alien air” could dishonor his work, he actually did write the last two
chapters in England. Martha Banta points out: “Even though the early
chapters of The American had already begun to appear in the Atlantic
Monthly in June 1876, the final portions of the story were still unfinished
when he crossed the English Channel. Indeed, James was still corresponding
with Howells concerning the developments of the narrative through March
1877” (7). In rewriting his novels and providing prefaces to them James was
composing his legacy and forming the romantic image of the artist at work2;
but James was also doing something more. He was also adding to his defense
of the ending of the novel. During the publication of the novel James had to
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fight both William Dean Howell’s—the editor of the Atlantic Monthly—and
the public, both of whom wanted the novel to end with a marriage (Edel 197),
and by suggesting that the novel was finished as one piece, in one location,
James was, perhaps, trying to stem the criticism that he might have been
distracted by the change of scene.
James, therefore, perpetuates a myth about the relationship between
the place of composition and the integrity of the novel, while at the same time
denying a direct correspondence between the scene in which he wrote the
novel and the world within it. James wants it both ways, to be in the world as
well as an individual apart from it. Like the paradox of the child who
experiences freedom while playing in the presence of the mother, James
experiences his freedom while tethered to an image of reality. Travel gives
him both the impression of being tied to an experience of the real and the
impression that he is wandering beyond the pail of parental influence.
Through travel James develops a playful attitude in which he feels both of the
world and separate from it.
James is, of course, aware of the precarious logic of his preface and
reconciles the apparent paradox through a psychological discussion o f the
novelist in which he attempts to distinguish between the “real” and the
“romantic.” In this passage, James draws the distinction between the outer
world, which if not yet known, still, one day, might be known, and the inner
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world, which remains a mystery. James states that what is typically taken for
romance, “simply the unknown”—foreign people and places—is not true
romance, further explaining his distinction:
The real represents to my perception the things we cannot
possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another,
it being but one of the accidents of our hampered state,
and one of the incidents o f their quantity and number,
that particular instances have not yet come our way. The
romantic stands, on the other hand, for the things that,
with all the facilities in the world, all the wealth and all
the courage and all the wit and all the adventure, we
never can directly know; the things that can reach us only
through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our
thought and our desire, (xv-xvi)
The “real” is the world James inhabits, while the “romantic” is the mysterious
world of the artist who operates circuitously and through a subterfuge of
conscious thought. In other words, James cannot explain the relationship
between his art and the world which he travels through, but he is able to
reflect on one quality of “romance” that bears a relationship to both the world
of the traveler and the world of the novelist:
The only general attribute of projected romance that I can
see, the only one that fits all its cases, is the fact o f the
kind of experience with which it deals—experience
liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, dis
embroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions
that we usually know to attach to it and, if we wish so to
put the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a medium
which relieves it, in a particular interest of the
inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state
subject to all our vulgar communities The balloon of
experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under
that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable
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length, in the more or less commodious car of the
imagination; but it is by the rope we know where we are,
and from the moment that cable is cut we are at large and
unrelated: we only swing apart from the globe—though
remaining as exhilarated, naturally, as we like, especially
when all goes well. The art o f the romancer is, “for the
fun of it,” insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without
our detecting him. (xvii-xviii)
Leaving home, escaping the family’s pull on one’s self-development, is one
way of cutting that cable; writing a novel, James suggests is another way of
liberating the balloon. James proposes that the ending of The American
represents the cutting of the cable when the reader least expects it. Ironically,
James’ realism becomes, in his definition, “romance,” because he thwarts the
expectations of the reader who desires a romance to end in a wedding.
But it is not only in the ending that James liberates the reader from the
experience of the real. Edwin Fussell, in his insightful “Time and
Topography in The American.” discusses the ways James changed the
surroundings of the novel in order to, essentially, take setting out of his plot.
Fussell, picking up on the dating of the novel’s action— 1868—in the first
sentence of the novel, inquires into why James would place his setting so
specifically eight years prior to the writing o f the novel. Fussell finds a clue
with the mention of Christopher Newman’s “Baedeker,” also in the first
paragraph. In researching James’ use of the guide book, Fussell finds that the
guides of 1876 spent much of their space declaiming the political upheavals
o f France, worrying over the destruction o f tourist attractions, and James
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consciously placed his action in a more stable setting, eight years back when
the Second Empire was still in place. Fussell claims, therefore, that James is
not using France as a realistic backdrop, but constructing a setting; one
believes there is a real referent for the setting of the novel, but “what is
unusual about The American is the degree to which it inserts as much space as
possible into the disjunctive chasm between what is real and what is not”
(171). In other words, France of the 1870’s is nothing like the world o f the
novel: “In The American James will pursue melodrama in his narrative and
the opposite of melodrama in his setting. He will require for his setting a
Paris more or less opposite to that of the guidebooks” (169). The France in
which James wrote the novel contains melodrama and would have become a
character of its own in the novel.
James’ preface, then, Fussell argues, further clouds the issue because
James makes the real France an issue in his reflections about the composition
of the novel: “James fondly reimagines his setting, ‘the life of a splendid city,’
as if it were somehow mysteriously contained by, inside of, his narrative, ‘my
particular cluster of circumstances,’ each situationally necessitating the other
(narrative and selling), reciprocally, unitively, ‘playing up in it like a flashing
fountain in a marble basin’” (172). I would argue, however, that while James
does make a connection between the place in which he wrote the novel and
the novel itself, he also undoes that connection with the metaphor o f the
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balloon. James is nothing if not subtle,3 and he hints at the ways he has
liberated himself and his characters from the constraints that threaten to drag
them down. James went to France not so much to visit the Louvre, but rather
to liberate himself from his family and in writing the novel James further
liberates himself from the constraints of writing non-fiction. In both cases
James creates an environment in which he can play, able to take liberties
while still feeling tethered to reality. In the novels, more than in his other
writings, James is able to imaginatively link inner and outer worlds.
The link o f The American is Christopher Newman, the central
consciousness of the novel, the one thing, James claims, that does matter.
Even if Paris is not the real Paris and the Bellegardes are not realistically
drawn, James feels the novel succeeds because o f the main character: “If
Newman was attaching enough, I must have argued, his tangle would be
sensible enough; for the interest of everything is all that it is his vision, his
conception, his interpretation: at the window of his wide, consciousness we
are seated, from that admirable position we ‘assist’” (“Preface” xxi). As
Newman is the focus of the novel, he has received the most critical attention,
much of it reflecting on him as a characterization of the innocent American
abroad.4 And, indeed, James places clues that Newman is to be taken as
typical. James begins the second paragraph by proposing that an observer of
Newman “might have felt a certain humorous relish o f the almost ideal
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completeness with which he filled out the national mould,” and James also
makes allusions to the archetypal model of the American self-made man,
Benjamin Franklin. In recounting Newman’s past, James comments upon his
entrance into San Francisco: “If he did not, like Dr. Franklin in Philadelphia,
march along the street munching a penny-loaf, it was only because he had not
the penny-loaf necessary to the performance” (533). But the drawing of
Newman goes beyond caricature, and James presents him as a traveler in a
complex relationship to the world he is travelling through.
Just as Newman is figured as an American, James also makes it clear
that Newman is a tourist and an outsider. Not only does the novel begin with
reference to Newman’s “Baedeker,” but throughout the novel, even at the
height o f the action, James reintroduces Newman’s guidebook. For instance,
after the death of Valentin, James tracks Claire de Cintre down in Fleurieres
and despite the drama of the moment reflects with thoughts appropriate to a
travel writer “The chateau was near the road; this was at once its merit and its
defect; but its aspect was extremely impressive. Newman learned afterwards,
from a guide-book of the province, that it dated from the time of Henry IV”
(781). Again, when finally meeting up with Claire, Newman is again made to
feel like an outsider “Newman crossed the threshold o f a room o f superb
proportions, which make him feel at first like a tourist with a guide-book and
a cicerone awaiting a fee” (782). And like a tourist he is generally concerned
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with collecting, whether it be impressions or more tangible items. He is the
American consumer:
He believed that Europe was made for him, and not he
for Europe.. . . The world, to his sense, was a great bazar,
where one might stroll about and purchase handsome
things. . . To expand, without bothering about it—
without shiftless timidity on one side, or loquacious
eagerness on the other—to the full compass of what he
would have called a “pleasant” experience, was
Newman’s most definite programme of life. (574-5)
Like the writer of the travel sketches, “deflowering the shops,” Newman is a
collector, but while he is presented, in one sense, as the easy going American
consumer, one can sense the tension between expanding “without bothering
about it” and having a “definite programme of life.” Newman experiences the
friction between his actions in the world and his feelings towards them.
To clarify Newman’s response as a traveller, James distinguishes him
through contrast with his fellow tourists, specifically his fellow Americans—
Tristram and Babcock. Newman first meets up with Tristram, an old
acquaintance, who wanders into the Louvre, “equipped with neither guide
book nor opera-glass” (526), for only his second time in the six years he has
spent in Paris; he wanted to find out “what was going on” (530). But
Tristram’s main purpose in life seems to be to gratify his appetites, especially
smoking. He says of Paris: “It’s an awful country; you can’t get a decent cigar
. . . Hang it, I don’t care for pictures; I prefer the reality!” (530). The problem
with Tristram is that his idea of “reality” is impoverished; it only relates to
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satiating a crudely defined material body. Not to say that Tristram is crude in
his taste; he does find Newman an elegant apartment, but he is one who
imposes his idea o f reality upon the world, without being responsive to the
world around him. Another traveler Newman meets up with while travelling
in Holland is Benjamin Babcock. Babcock is a caricature of the religious
American; he is a Unitarian minister subsisting on a diet of “Graham bread
and hominy” (576) and he finds Newman’s delight in travel decadent.
Babcock does not suffer from any delight: “He mistrusted the European
temperament, he suffered from the European climate, he hated the European
dinner-hour; European life seemed to him unscrupulous and impure” (577).
After several days o f disagreement over their judgments of art, Babcock
makes a break with Newman, addressing a letter to him accusing Newman of
shallow perceptions. Babcock writes:
I have a high degree of responsibility. You appear to care
only for the pleasure of the hour, and you give yourself
up to it with a violence which I confess I am not able to
emulate. I feel as if I must arrive at some conclusion and
fix my belief on certain points. Art and life seem to me
intensely serious things, and in our travels in Europe we
should especially remember the immense seriousness of
Art. You seem to hold that if a thing amuses you for the
moment, that is all you need ask for it; and your relish for
mere amusement is also much higher than mine. (581)
Babcock’s judgment o f Newman, like his judgment of art is overbearing.
Babcock’s response, like Tristram’s, is heavily prejudiced; neither one can see
beyond their own confining judgments.
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Newman, on the other hand, is responsive to the world. Instead of
imposing his will upon the world, Newman seeks, however awkwardly, to
find his place within it Spurred by Babcock’s criticism, Newman reflects on
his travel:
Could he not scrape together a few conclusions? Baden-
Baden was the prettiest place he had seen yet and
orchestral music in the evening, under the stars, was
decidedly a great institution. This was one of his
conclusions! But he went on to reflect that he had done
very wisely to pull up stakes and come abroad; this
seeing of the world was a very interesting thing. He had
learned a great deal; he couldn’t say just what but he had
it there under his hat-band. He had done what he wanted;
he had seen the great things, and he had given his mind a
chance to “improve,” if it would. He cheerfully believed
that it had improved. Yes, this seeing of the world was
very pleasant, and he would willingly do a little more of
it. (583)
Newman is not bent on conclusions; when he tries to conclude his judgments
seem trite. Rather than attacking Europe with his intellect, he feels his way
around, and he feels as if life is before him. Newman remarks: “I must
confess,. . . that here I don’t feel at all smart. My remarkable talents seem of
no use. I feel as simple as a little child, and a little child might take me by the
hand and lead me about” (534). Travel creates the link between the real and
the romantic, a state in which he feels grounded in real experience while at
the same time aware of possibilities for growth. Such a feeling gives
Newman a sense of being grounded, which he projects towards others. When
Valentin Bellegarde visits Newman’s apartment, for example, he describes
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what he finds so appealing about Newman. It is not his brains, nor his
physique, but rather, as he tells him, “it’s a sort of air you have of being
thoroughly at home in the world . . . I fancy you going about the world like a
man traveling on a railroad in which he owns a large amount of stock” (608).
Newman is not the typical tourist which James parodies in the
characters of Tristram and Babcock. Rather, he is one who cares about the
harmony between inner and outer worlds and James makes it clear that the
motivation for Newman’s travels comes specifically from the attempt to
reconcile inner and outer experience. In recounting his reasons for going to
Europe, Newman tells Tristram that in New York he had had a mental
breakthrough after being cheated in a business deal. Newman knew he had
been cheated and had revenge in hand but then he let it drop. He describes his
peculiar state of mind at the time:
The idea of losing that sixty thousand dollars, of letting it
utterly slide and scuttle and never hearing of it again,
seemed the sweetest thing in the world. And all this took
place quite independently of my will, and I sat watching
it as if it were a play at the theatre. I could feel it going
on inside of me. You may depend upon it that there are
things going on inside of us that we understand mighty
little about. (536)
Newman has respect for inner states and he recognizes his need to tether that
state to reality. Therefore, he sets sail for Europe: “I seemed to feel a new
man inside my old skin, and I longed for a new world. When you want a thing
so very badly you had better treat yourself to it. I didn’t understand the
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matter, not in the least, but I gave the old horse the bridle and let him find his
way. As soon as I could get out of the game I sailed for Europe” (536-7).
Newman could not continue in the atmosphere of New York, a world that
seemed foriegn to his newfound lack of concern for money lost. This episode
spurs his European travels and also foreshadows his injury at the hands of the
Bellegardes, his letting that matter drop and his subsequent return to America.
As the novel closes he felt that he was again out of tune with his environment,
this time Europe, and he returns to America to regain the sense of balance
between inner and outer states. Newman is not, then, the typical American
traveler imposing an American sense of justice upon those who betray him.
Rather he is a traveler trying to find his way in the world, trying to find
situations that foster personal independence and a sense of harmony with his
environment. For a time he found this potential space in Europe, a
playground for wealthy Americans, and when he no longer felt it there he
returned to the United States. Although he seems to have had enough of
Europe, one senses, at the end of the novel, that his travels are not yet over.
2
When James planned the writing of The Portrait of a Ladv he
imagined his protagonist, Isabel Archer, as the female counterpart to
Christopher Newman, but as Leon Edel points out in “The Myth of America
and The Portrait of a Ladv.” during the development o f the novel James
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recognized that translating Newman’s sense of physical and psychological
freedom into the experience o f a nineteenth century American woman would
be beyond his capabilities. Edel further suggests that James subsequently
created Isabel’s friend, Henrietta Stackpole, the travel writer—the closest
thing James knew to a “frontier woman”—as the counterpart to Newman (12).
Such an interpretation is a bit misleading, however, because it hinges on a
narrow definition of Newman’s character, simply taking those aspects that are
figured as typically “American” and ignoring the rest. As we have seen,
Newman is drawn in contrast to provincial American tourists; he is too open
in his response to the world to impose a narrow interpretation on his
experience. In this respect, he is clearly more closely allied with Isabel.
Henrietta, on the other hand, is like Babcock; though not so broadly drawn,
she is presented as an example of the provincial American tourist.
One might expect that Henrietta, a newspaper correspondent working
her way through Europe by writing travel sketches, would have the sympathy
of James and in many ways she does. James does endow Henrietta with some
sharp insight, particularly when Isabel gains her inheritance and Henrietta
accurately forecasts her friend’s future. Henrietta tells her:
The peril for you is that you live too much in the world of
your own dreams—you are not enough in contact with
reality—with the toiling, striving, suffering, I may even
say sinning, world that surrounds you. You are too
fastidious; you have too many graceful illusions. Your
newly-acquired thousands will shut you up more and more
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to the society of a few selfish and heartless people, who
will be interested in keeping up those illusions. (413)
We soon leam that Isabel is fooled by the people around her, and Osmond and
Madame Merle can surely be described as “selfish and heartless,” but James
offers up Henrietta’s cynical view as another type of limitation. Henrietta’s
attention is generally focused outward and when it is focused inward it is, as
her last name—Stackpole—suggests, with a rigidity of thought. For instance,
Henrietta who sends travel sketches to the Interviewer writes from “the
radical point of view—an enterprise the less difficult as she knew perfectly in
advance what her opinions would be, and to how many objections most
European institutions lay open” (243). Further, Henrietta remarks on one of
her writing plans: “I was going to bring in your cousin—the alienated
American. There is a great demand just now for the alienated American, and
your cousin is a beautiful specimen. I should have handled him severely”
(278). Henrietta carries her prejudices on her sleeve and perhaps that is the
sincerest way of carrying them, but while Henrietta would argue that she is
engaged in the real—corruptible—world, her cynicism prohibits her from
seeing the world in all its complexity.
James presents Henrietta as the “American” but he cannot fully
endorse her; even when she is praised it comes out funny. Isabel explains to
Ralph her fondness for Henrietta, suggesting she reminds one of the American
landscape: “I like the great country stretching away beyond the rivers and
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across the prairies, blooming and smiling and spreading, till it stops at the
blue Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and
Henrietta—excuse my simile—has something o f that odour in her garments”
(285). This passage conveys a curious mixed message. One is initially struck
by the description of an odor. As Isabel suggests with her disclaimer, there is
something indelicate and unfeminine in pointing out a women’s “odour.” But
while such an allusion is unfeminine, its use in the sentence is sexually
charged. America is depicted as “stretching . . . blooming and smiling and
spreading”; in other words, it is seductive as well as slightly offensive.
Translating Newman into an American woman, as Edel suggests, was difficult
for James and Henrietta might be seen as an experiment in making that
translation. But in order to have Henrietta stand in for the American, James
takes away her conventional femininity, while at the same time giving her, at
least in Isabel’s eyes, sexual potency. Even in Isabel’s interpretation,
however, there is something fishy about Henrietta; she would not serve as the
central character of James’s novel. Therefore Henrietta serves as a minor
character, taking on the patriotic strain, while Isabel takes on the wide-eyed,
expansive, vulnerable qualities of Newman.
Much has been written about the inspiration for Isabel; as Edel points
out, she not only shares much in common with James’s cousin Minny Temple,
but she has even more in common with James himself. Edel explains: “He
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endows her with the background of his own Albany childhood, and when he
sends her to Europe and makes her into an heiress, he places her in a
predicament similar to his own” (Henry 258). Like James, Isabel is given the
opportunity to choose the circumstances of her life, or as Thoreau put it, to
“live deliberately” (61). But the connections between James and Isabel go
beyond their movement from Albany to Europe. William Veeder, in “The
Feminine Orphan and the Emergent Master,” picks up on yet another link
between James and his protagonist, suggesting that Isabel’s position as an
orphan relates to James’s childhood fantasies: “Having as a small boy
defended against the threat o f extirpation by engaging in the fantasy of
orphanhood, James enacts this fantasy as an adult by filling The Portrait of a
Ladv with orphans” (30). Veeder successfully shows that the novel is
overpopulated with orphans, o f which Isabel is only the most prominent,
reflecting on James’s childhood desire to be free from his family.
One reason James created so many orphans is to create space around
his characters, space in which they can act out of their own determination.
James considered himself a realist, but he works in stark contrast to the Frank
Norris and Theodore Dreiser brand of realism in which fictional characters
are largely determined by their circumstances. James’s characters are marked
by their individualism; instead of creating highly determined situations James
clears situations away, giving the characters room to develop. At first one is
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struck by the confinement o f the characters as many of the scenes of the novel
take place indoors and convey a claustrophobic feeling. But whether it is
Osmond’s intensively cultivated chambers, Pansy’s convent or even Isabel’s
grandmother’s house in Albany, the characters are always given the chance to
break out of their confinement. Even Pansy, the least powerful of the main
characters, is given a choice when Isabel asks her to come with her to England
(763); even though Pansy decides to obey “Papa” and stay in the convent she
has determined her own course o f action, she has chosen to do as she is told.
Isabel, like Pansy, had also been confined when Mrs. Touchett first
discovered her in Albany. They meet at Isabel’s grandmother’s house that
had recently been put up for sale, suggesting Isabel’s fate as well; as a woman
without means, Isabel faced the prospect of making a mercenary marriage.
Isabel’s confinement is further reinforced by her position in the house. The
reader follows Mrs. Touchett in a circuitous journey through the house until
she discovers Isabel in the darkest, “most joyless chamber,” the “office.”
Although this room has a door to the street it is shut off from the outside
world; the door is bolted and the window is covered with green paper. Isabel
is enchanted by the door: “But she had no wish to look out, for this would
have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the
other side—a place which became, to the child’s imagination, according to its
different moods, a region o f delight or terror” (214). Although Isabel’s pros
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pects appear limited, she finds comfort in the unseen spaces that such a door
represents. Mrs. Touchett shows up to take Isabel out of that dark “office”
and into the light, into a world of self-determination.
As James claims, in the preface to the New York edition of the novel,
the motivation for writing the novel came from his intrigue with the character
of Isabel. He began The Portrait of a Ladv. not with a situation, but with a
character and he simply wanted to discover what she would do. Like Ralph
Touchett, who convinces his father to bequeath a fortune to Isabel so that he
can “see what she does with herself,” James also wants to “put a little wind in
her sails” (Portrait 378). That wind is strengthened by her orphanhood and by
her inheritance, and it is also strengthened by her travels. If Isabel were not
an orphan she would not have been “adopted” by Mrs. Touchett and that lady
would not have taken Isabel to Europe. To be an orphan is to be free but
James is more interested in the direction that freedom takes; in the preface,
therefore, James touches upon the importance o f travel in the novel: “What
will she ‘do’? Why, the first thing she’ll do will be to come to Europe; which
in fact will form, and all inevitably, no small part of her principal adventure.
Coming to Europe is even for the ‘frail vessels,’ in this wonderful age, a mild
adventure” (xx). James is not interested in pulling the rug from beneath his
protagonist’s feet; rather he wants to create the “mild adventure” in which the
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character is given space to grow without fear of becoming psychologically
overwhelmed by the experience.
Although one can readily imagine how fantasies o f orphanhood and
travel operate as ways of creating potential space, one should also note the
peculiar way images of familial relations and travel are intertwined in James’s
mental landscape. In this respect, The American is an exception. Christopher
Newman is, as his name suggests, a man without history. In the narrative he
has no mother or father, no past lovers; his only history is as a business man.
In other words, he comes from a world James never knew. With The Portrait
of a Ladv. however, James is in his element and he presents travel as a family
affair, giving Isabel a travelling history similar to his own. Like James, Isabel
and her siblings were given a sporadic European education, brought on by
their father’s intense, if inconsistent, concern over their education. Isabel
reflects back on the father who, at once, “spoiled and neglected” his
daughters:
Her father had a large way of looking at life, o f which his
restlessness and even his occasional incoherency of
conduct had been only a proof. He wished his daughters,
even as children, to see as much of the world as possible;
and it was for this purpose that, before Isabel was
fourteen, he had transported them three times across the
Atlantic, giving them on each occasion, however, but a
few months’ view of foreign lands; a course which had
whetted our heroine’s curiosity without enabling her to
satisfy it. (224)
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James was moved, and sometimes jerked, between the United States and
Europe because of his father’s apparent concern over the children’s
education; he also saw Europe three times by the time he was sixteen.
Isabel’s father began the quest to find the proper place for his daughter’s
development and she, interiorizing his search, continues that quest.
Travelling to Europe fulfills an expectation that began with her youthful
travels, and creates a potential space in which Isabel experiences her own
development, a rare experience o f living in the moment. The narrator de
scribes Isabel: “She had and immense curiosity about life, and was constantly
staring and wondering. She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her
deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her
own heart and the agitations of the world” (225). Thoreau writes, “Going
from—toward; it is the history o f every one of us,” and Isabel’s goal is to live
in that ineffable dash; travel gives her the impression that she is riding that
crest, “from—toward,” experiencing the connection between past and future
and an integration between inner and outer worlds.
Europe, to Isabel, as it was to James, offered a great experiment in
personal independence. And like James’s father, who spent his life chasing
after conclusions, but rarely finding any, Isabel’s mind lacked sharp edges.
The narrator says of Isabel: “Her thoughts were a tangle o f vague outlines,
which had never been corrected by the judgment of people who seemed to her
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to speak with authority. In matters of opinion she had had her own way, and
it had led her into a thousand ridiculous zigzags” (241). Isabel’s only
conviction seems to be an unrelenting concern for her spiritual and
psychological integrity and such a concern leads her into making her life into
an experiment. She has one tenet to direct her course: “she always returned to
her theory that a young woman whom after all every one thought clever,
should begin by getting a general impression of life.” At first, Gardencourt
serves her curiosity—“England was a revelation to her, and she found herself
as entertained as a child at a pantomime” (244)—until Lord Warburton’s
affections are known and then she finds London more attractive. But even
London, and the constant company of Ralph, wear on her and she desires
more personal space: “She had moreover a great fondness for intervals of
solitude, and since her arrival in England it had been but scantily gratified”
(347). Whenever companionship becomes too pervasive Isabel, like Huck
Finn, lights out for new territory.
Travel, for Isabel, is a constant flux between expansion and
contraction. Isabel wants to feel that the world is large—“she had a fixed
determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion,
o f irresistible action” (241)—and travel satisfies this need, but at the same
time, her travelling companions make the world too small. One way her
companions—Madame Merle, Mrs. Touchett and Ned Rosier—make the
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world small is by only appreciating a superficial view of themselves and
Europe. Merle, with sharp, cynical insight into the American’s life abroad
tells Isabel:
You should live in your own country; whatever it may be
you have your natural place there. If we are not good
Americans we are certainly poor Europeans; we have no
natural place here. We are mere parasites, crawling over
the surface; we haven’t our feet in the soil. At least one
can know it, and not have illusions. A woman, perhaps,
can get on, a woman, it seems to me, has no natural place
anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain
on the surface and, more or less, to crawl. (392)
Madame Merle takes this philosophy and develops it into a psychology of the
self. Like a Buddhist monk, she looks for her self and finds nothing there:
What do you call one’s self? Where does it begin?
Where does it end? It overflows into everything that
belongs to us—and then it flows back again. I know that
a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear. I
have a great respect for things! One’s self—for other
people—is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s
house, one’s clothes, the book one reads, the company
one keeps—these things are all expressive. (397-8)
Merle’s idea that the only thing worth knowing is what one can accumulate is
backed up by Rosier who claims one cannot become tired of Europe, even if
one tries: “Take the Hotel Drouot, now; they sometimes have three and four
sales a week” (411). Isabel even begins to see through Mrs. Touchett who
seemed to have “so little surface”: “Nothing tender, nothing sympathetic, had
ever had a chance to fasten upon it—no wind-sown blossom, no familiar
moss. Her passive extent, in other words, was about that of a knife-edge”
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(417). When Isabel is joined by her sister Lily and her children, much as
James was joined periodically by William and Alice, she enjoys their
company but is relieved when they leave: “The world lay before her—she
could do whatever she chose. There was something exciting in the feeling”
(522). Europe presented the perfect adventure; Isabel was connected to both
her travelling companions and immediate family but at the same time she was
free from them, comforted by the knowledge that they would soon be
elsewhere.
Europe, while providing a mild adventure for Isabel, also offered a
colorful, while at the same time, tame, scene for James’s action. While
Europe might be considered one of the main character’s in James’s earlier
works, such as “Travelling Companions” or Roderick Hudson, in The Portrait
of a Ladv the emphasis is not put on what Isabel is seeing, but rather on her
feelings towards the scene. For instance, the interlude with Lily and the
children, as well as her subsequent journey to Turkey, Greece and Egypt are
narrated retrospectively with little detail. The reader only discovers Isabel’s
response to that year spent travelling. The time spent with Lily must have
been claustrophobic; as soon as she leaves, Isabel’s energy seems to spill
forth. Isabel is like a junkie getting a fix, as she, at last on her own, wanders
around London:
Isabel performed the journey with a positive enjoyment
of its dangers, and lost her way almost on purpose, in
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order to get more sensations, so that she was disappointed
when an obliging policeman easily set her right again.
She was so fond o f the spectacle o f human life that she
enjoyed even the aspect of gathering dusk in the London
Streets—the moving crowds, the hurrying cabs, the
lighted shops, the flaring stalls, the dark, shining
dampness o f everything. (522)
The reader can sense the desperation in her travels, as if she is making up for
lost time: “Isabel travelled rapidly, eagerly, audaciously; she was like a thirsty
person draining cup after cup” (523). It is with this spirit that she undertakes
the journey to the Middle East with Madame Merle and it is on this journey
that she the faults in Merle begin to show through.
Companionship, even that o f the people she valued most—Ralph and
Merle—proved tiring, but travel kept Isabel’s expectations afloat, especially
when she thought about Italy: “Italy, as yet imperfectly seen and felt, stretched
before her as a land of promise” (420). While Isabel visits many places
throughout the novel, Italy represents the most emotionally charged
environment. In Sensuous Pessimism: Italy in the Work of Henry James. Carl
Maves points out that Italy had good reasons for holding a special fascination
for James. Not only did Italy represent ancient culture, but more importantly,
James discovered it on his own: “In all the protracted European wanderings of
his childhood the James family never once touched there, and Henry’s initial
Italian pilgrimage was thus made alone, as a mature young man with fourteen
published short stories to his credit” (3). Maves also shows that Isabel’s
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entrance into Italy parallels James’s own, as James sets her travels contempo
raneous to his, in 1869 (78). Just as the setting of The American reflected
James’s awareness of current political changes, so too did The Portrait o f a
Ladv; by 1872, the time of James’s second Italian journey, the Republic had
been established, ending the romantic days of foreign occupation and Papal
rule over Rome (Maves 6). Romantic Italy brings out the best and the worst
o f American travelers. Given the connection between contraction and
expansion, it is not surprising that Italy, the place of Isabel’s greatest freedom,
is also the most claustrophobic, particularly when all her traveling
companions—Lord Warburton, Goodwood, Henrietta and Ralph—converge
on Rome at the same time.
Isabel’s first visit to Rome creates, for her, a potential space in which
she finds a sense of peace between herself and the world. The specifics o f her
travels are not important, as the narrator begins: “I shall not undertake to give
an account of Isabel’s impressions o f Rome.” Rather, the narrative focuses on
her response: “To her own knowledge she was very happy; she would even
have been willing to believe that these were to be on the whole the happiest
hours of her life” (485). Unlike Newman, who remains tied to his travel
guide, Isabel, in this expansive mood, learns to navigate without Murray:
Her feelings were so mingled that she scarcely knew
whither any o f them would lead her, and she went about
in a kind of repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing
often in the things she looked at a great deal more than
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was there, and yet not seeing many of the items
enumerated in “Murray.” (485)
Isabel’s travels serve as an antidote to the feeling of suffocation she
experienced around Warburton and Goodwood. When Goodwood complains
that she is running from him she argues, “The world strikes me as small”
(355), further explaining her aversion to his company: “Don’t think me
unkind if I say that it’s just that—being out of your sight—that I like. If you
were in the same place as I, I should feel as if you were watching me, and I
don’t like that. I like my liberty too much. If there is a thing in the world that
I am fond of... it is my personal independence” (356). Ironically, as she
stands in her expansive Roman mood in Saint Peters, Osmond sneaks up on
her from behind, representing another attack upon her independence.
Isabel’s quest is to maintain that feeling of being at the crest of the
wave, at the same time, moving and moved by the world. In intermittent
spurts her travels create the potential space in which she feels the connection
between inner and outer states, but in the end, her attempts at self-
determination are thwarted. When Isabel meets Goodwood at the conclusion
to the novel, he tries to appeal to her sensibilities, telling her, “The world is
all before us—and the world in very large.” He tries to tap into her notion
that the world is an expansive place that offered limitless possibilities for
personal growth. But by this time she is not the conscientious traveler that
began the novel and responds: ‘“The world is veiy small,’ she said, at random
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. . . She said it at random, to hear herself say something; but it was not what
she meant. The world, in truth, had never seemed so large; it seemed to open
out, all round her, to take the form o f a mighty sea, where she floated in
fathomless waters” (798). The world does seem large to her, but with a
crucial difference. Whereas she once experienced her future as limitless
possibility, now the image is one of fear approaching despair. Her mild
adventure turns into a terrifying moment in which she is in danger of being
swallowed by the sea, by the world around her, in which she has lost a sense
o f control over her life. The ending of The Portrait of a Ladv is ambiguous
and a bit abrupt, but James does make it clear that Isabel, as a traveler, has
changed; she has given up too much, losing herself in gaining the world.
While The Portrait of a Ladv has historically received widespread
critical praise, the critical reception of The Ambassadors has been much more
contentious. In an often reprinted quotation F. R. Leavis argues that Paris is
not a worthwhile symbol, at least not in the way its presented in the book,
claiming that whatever literary rewards the book offers, they are not worth the
reader’s efforts:
What, we ask, is this, symbolized by Paris, that Strether
feels himself to have missed in his own life? Has James
himself sufficiently inquired? Is it anything adequately
realized? If we are to take the elaboration of the theme in
the spirit in which we are meant to take it, haven’t we to
take the symbol too much at the glamorous face-value it
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has for Strether? Isn’t, that is, the energy of the “doing”
(and the energy demanded for the reading)
disproportionate to the issues—to any issues that are
concretely held and presented? (The Great Tradition 161)
Upon further reflection, Leavis’s position only hardened; in The Common
Pursuit he adds, “I suspect that The Ambassadors, which to me remains
wholly boring, doesn’t belong so essentially with the other late “great” novels
... as perhaps, James himself in elaborating it, intended” (226). Indeed, in
the preface to the novel James did refer to it as “quite the best, ‘all round,’ of
all [his] productions” (2). But even more importantly, almost in anticipation
of Leavis’s argument, he also makes it clear that the novel is not really about
Paris.
One remarkable aspect of The Ambassadors is that critics trying to
approach James’s intentions can, besides going through the preface and
whatever changes he made for the New York edition, also examine a 20,000
word preliminary statement about the novel which was found in James’s
notebooks. In the notebook he tries out ideas for his setting: “I don’t
altogether like the banal side of Paris—it’s so obvious, so usual to make Paris
the vision that opens his eyes, makes him feel his mistake. It might be
London—it might be Italy—it might be the general impression of a summer in
Europe—abroad. Also, it may be Paris” (226). In the preface to the novel, he
again voices his concern: “There was the dreadful little old tradition, one of
the platitudes of the human comedy, that people’s moral scheme does break
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down in Paris” (7). James is bothered by the possibility that setting the novel
in Paris might be hackneyed, taking attention away from the individual
struggle of the protagonist, but James decided to use Paris anyway. “It may
be Paris” because little in the novel is about Paris. Newman does not go to
the Follies Bergere or the Louvre; most of the local descriptions are simply of
gardens: the Tuileries, the Luxembourg Gardens, Glorianni’s garden. Nor is
Strether led by the “Baedeker”; it is not even mentioned in this novel.
Although James relies on past observations of Chester and Paris, The
Ambassadors is far removed from the travel sketches of his youth. James
writes that Strether was to be thrown forth “in Paris, but with the surrounding
scene itself a minor matter, a mere symbol for more things than had been
dreamt of in the philosophy of Woollett” (“Preface” 8).
While The Ambassadors is far removed from the travel sketch, it does
represent a progression in the theme of the international traveler that
originates in James’s earliest work. Charles Anderson, in his book, Person.
Place, and Thine in Henry James’s Novels, reflects on the refinement of the
international theme in James’s novels: “In The American 08771 his treatment
of the contrast had been sociological; in The Portrait (1881) it was
humanistic, a marked improvement. Now in The Ambassadors (19031 there is
a further refinement: the mode of presenting the contrast is strictly poetic,
with respect to the hero” (220). Anderson seems to be getting at the idea that
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the focus moves further inward with each novel, as the surrounding scene—
whether it be England, France or Italy—becomes less emphasized, and that
idea makes sense. While The American is filled with foreigners, The
Ambassadors is populated solely by Americans with the exception of the
English speaking Madame de Vionnet and her daughter, Jeanne. But while
the narrative is moves further inward, helped along by the use of a first person
perspective in The Ambassadors. James’s focus on the characters as travelers
is no less pronounced, as his insight into the psychology of travel reaches a
new level of maturity.
As I have pointed out earlier, James used a number of devices in order
to foster the independence of his characters. Christopher Newman is alone in
the world, a wealthy businessman without intimate connection. Similarly,
Isabel Archer is not only an orphan, but she gains an inheritance that gives her
self-determination. In The Ambassadors, however, James finally seems to
learn to articulate his protagonist’s independence in the face of family and
financial pressures. In this novel, James dispels with the crude devices by
which he put wind into the sails of his protagonists. Lambert Strether, in the
latter stages of his life, is enmeshed in relationships, particularly with Mrs.
Newsome and her family. Not only does he have the prospect of manying
Mrs. Newsome, but he is financially dependent on her as well. His job as the
editor of the Woollett Review depends on her support; he tells Miss Gostrey
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about the journal, “she provides, as I’ve confided to you, all the money” (51).
And he also makes it clear that he is in Europe as Mrs. Newsome’s agent.
Waymarsh asks, “What does that mean then but that your trip is just for her?”
and Strether replies, “For Mrs. Newsome? Oh it certainly is, as I say. Very
much” (34). Strether is caught in a web of intentions that are not his own and
he knows it. Whereas James manipulates opportunities for Newman and
Archer, Strether’s liberation must be hard fought. Without the contrivances o f
the earlier novels, Strether’s battle more nearly represents the struggles of
James, the artist, who also fought to maintain his independence without
irreparably straining or breaking familial relations.
As in The American and The Portrait of a Ladv. The Ambassadors
features various travelers that serve to distinguish the protagonist’s
psychological outlook from those around him. As an aspect of the tighter
organization of the latter novel, Strether meets his main foils, Maria Gostrey
and Waymarsh, soon after his arrival in Liverpool and immediately interprets
them as being in competition for his attention, as representing different
responses to Europe; in a way, they are the Scylla and Charybdis he is forced
to navigate between if he is to discover his own creative response to his
surroundings. The Ambassadors begins with Strether’s arrival; he first meets
Miss Gostrey and wonders if his involvement with her represents disloyalty,
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an interruption of his purpose. He tries to rationalize his involvement with
But if it was ‘wrong’—why then he had better not have
come out at all. At this, poor man, had he already—and
even before meeting Waymarsh—arrived. He had
believed he had a limit, but the limit had been
transcended within thirty-six hours... It hadn’t been
‘Europe’ at Liverpool, no—not even in the dreadful
delightful impressive streets the night before—to the
extent his present companion made it so. (23)
The entrance into “Europe” depends less on the physical scene than it does on
a feeling of transgression. Only by taking a step that he knows would not be
sanctioned by Woollett, walking around Chester with Maria Gostrey, does
Strether feel he has arrived.
Part of Miss Gostrey’s objectionable nature is that she is a promoter of
the European experience; in other words, she is working against Strether’s
mission to rescue Chad from French indulgence. She is an articulate
temptress who seduces Strether with a sincere appraisal o f her position. He
claims to be afraid of her, but she counters:
That means simply that you’ve recognised me—which is
rather beautiful and rare. You see what I am.... If you’ll
only come on further as you have come you’ll at any rate
make out. My own fate has been too many for me, and
I’ve succumbed to it. I’m a general guide—to ‘Europe.’
don’t you know? I wait for people—I put them through.
I pick them up—I set them down. I’m a sort o f superior
‘courier-maid.’ I’m a companion at large. I take people,
as I’ve told you, about. . . . I know all the shops and the
prices—but I know worse things still. I bear on my back
the huge load of our national consciousness, or in other
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words—for it comes to that—of our nation itself. O f
what is our nation composed but o f the men and women
individually on my shoulders? I don’t do it, you know,
for any particular advantage. I don’t do it, for instance—
some people do, you know—for money. (25-6)
Maria Gostrey offers knowledge of not only the mundane—“shops and
prices”—but also of things hidden—“worse things still.” She represents an
enticing, open-armed embrace o f Europe which Strether has to fight against if
he is to perform his mission.
Contrasting Maria Gostrey’s embrace of all things European is
Waymarsh’s mistrust of all things European. Strether quickly put Miss
Gostrey into a category of opposition to his mission, but his opinion of
Waymarsh, an old friend, had been formed even before stepping off the boat.
From the first sentence of the novel, the narrator suggests that Strether came
to Europe with more on his mind than Mrs. Newsome’s task; he is not
displeased that Waymarsh is not in Liverpool to meet him: “on learning that
Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly discon
certed,” adding that he did not relish seeing Waymarsh’s countenance as “the
first ‘note,’ of Europe” (17). Waymarsh is the agitated American. Only in
Europe for his health, he is bothered by most of what he finds there; in this
way, he is a direct descendent of Benjamin Babcock and Henrietta Stackpole.
Strether picks up on Waymarsh’s distaste for travel, reflecting: “‘Europe,’ he
had begun to gather from these things, had up to now rather failed of its
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message to him; he hadn’t got into tune with it and had at the end of three
months almost renounced any such expectation” (29). Critics, such as Charles
Anderson, have pointed out James’s recurrent use of quotation marks around
Europe, suggesting that James meant to place the emphasis on the American’s
idea of Europe, rather than an accurate portrayal of it (231). Clearly,
Waymarsh’s view is limited; his favorite part of Paris is the American bank,
because a visit there refreshes his sense of business: “Europe was best
described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined
American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only
rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of
wandering western airs” (58). While Miss Gostrey seems happily accepting
of even the “worst things” o f Europe, Waymarsh is suspicious of the
European influence, suggesting that it is not even improving his health:
“the fact is, such a country as this ain’t my kind of
country anyway. There ain’t a country I’ve seen over
here that does seem my kind. Oh I don’t say but what
there are plenty of pretty places and remarkable old
things; but the trouble is that I don’t seem to feel
anywhere in tune. That’s one of the reasons why I
suppose I’ve gained so little. I haven’t had the first sign
of that lift I was led to expect.” With this he broke out
more earnestly. “Look here—I want to go back.” (32)
There is a strange connection between Strether’s reading of Waymarsh and
Waymarsh’s own assessment In both instances, they refer to being “out of
tune,” while also giving the impression that there is a place where one might
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be in tune. This metaphor, while it is applied to Waymarsh here, is important
because it also refers to Strether and his search for self expression. Strether is
the one who is really out of tune and his maturity depends on his learning that
one cannot simply escape to a place wherein discordant sounds become
beautiful music; rather, self-development necessitates tuning out the changing
scene and tuning into one’s self.
When he arrives in Liverpool, Strether is clearly out o f tune and at
odds with himself; he is “burdened. . . with the oddity o f a double
consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiousity in his
difference” (18). This quotation is a bit opaque but it does communicate the
image of separate selves working against each other. Strether is preoccupied
and expresses his real terror at his inability to focus on the moment at hand.
He confesses to Miss Gostrey:
You put your finger on it a few minutes ago. It’s general,
but it avails itself of particular occasions. That’s what
it’s doing for me now. I’m always considering something
else; something else, I mean, than the thing of the
moment. The obsession of the other thing is the terror.
I’m considering at present for instance something else
than you. (26)
Strether is unable to respond creatively to the environment around him; in
other words, he is unable to play. As he arrives in Europe he is still in range
of the smothering influence of the mother, Mrs. Newsome, who sent him to
Europe as her ambassador, to act according to her vision of the world.
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Strether wants to be able to act independently, to fashion his own creative
response, hence his joy at not meeting up with Waymarsh directly, but he is
unable to act as a free agent. He is caught in the large influence of Chad’s
mother.
Strether is quite articulate about the influence of Mrs. Newsome. For
instance, when Chad feels the need to remind Strether where his loyalties
ought to lie, exclaiming “Well, at your age, and with what—when all’s said
and done—Mother might do for you and be for you,” Strether responds with a
clear appraisal o f his situation: “My absence o f an assured future. The little I
have to show toward the power to take care o f myself. The way, the
wonderful way, she would certainly take care o f me. Her fortune, her
kindness, and the constant miracle of her having been disposed to go even so
far. Of course, of course... There are those sharp facts” (288). Strether is
kept under the loving thumb of Mrs. Newsome and his travels are a last
attempt to wriggle free. But unlike Christopher Newman and Isabel Archer
he is constantly reminded of his vulnerable position in the world as the editor
of a small literary journal. Such an awareness o f his place keeps Mrs.
Newsome constantly present. When Waymarsh begins to make his move on
Miss Barrace, Strether is momentarily jealous until he comes back to his sense
of Mrs. Newsome: “But Strether had swung back to the consciousness that for
himself after all it never would have done. Waymarsh hadn’t Mrs. Waymarsh
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in the least to consider, whereas Lambert Strether had constantly, in the
inmost honour of his thoughts, to consider Mrs. Newsome” (159).
It seems that Strether cannot play in the presence of the mother, but
that is only because she will not allow him any space. At first, Strether is only
connected to Woollett by letters and he enjoys that freedom. Letters help
Strether maintain the illusion of connection even when he is breaking away:
he was writing, but he was of course always writing; it
was a practice that continued, oddly enough, to relieve
him, to make him come nearer than anything else to the
consciousness of doing something: so that he often
wondered if he hadn’t really, under his recent stress, ac
quired some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of
make-believe. (196)
Mrs. Newsome seems, however, to pick up on the tone of his letters because
she stops writing to him, waiting instead for her daughter, Sarah Pocock—the
second ambassador—to report. This silence produces a strange effect in
Strether:
It was at any rate significant, and what was remarkable
was the way his friend’s nature and manner put on for
him, through this very drop of demonstration, a greater
intensity. It struck him really that he had never so lived
with her as during this period of her silence . . . he
walked about with her, sat with her, drove with her and
dined face-to-face with her... He knew it for the
queerest of adventures—a circumstance capable of
playing such a part only for Lambert Strether—that in
Paris itself, of all places, he should find this ghost of the
lady of Woollett more importunate than any other
presence. (197)
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In these passages and others James create a wonderful tension between
playfulness and struggle. On the one hand, Strether is caught in a life and
death struggle for freedom, but at the same time, he experiences it as a play.
It is a queer adventure, “a circumstance capable of playing such a part only
for Lambert Strether.” And later he feels that he and Madame de Vionnet
were put on stage for the rest of the characters: “It was indeed as if they were
arranged, gathered for a performance, the performance o f ‘Europe’ by his
confederate and himself’ (228). It is the juxtaposition of these two
impressions—that of playing a part, and that of being engaged in a serious
business—that creates choices for Strether. As Madame de Vionnet says, she
has upset his sense of “all the decencies and possibilities” (323); his absence
from Woollett blurs the lines between what he ought to do and what he might
do.
The longer Strether stays in Paris the clearer his choices become as he
begins to see Mrs. Newsome through her other ambassador, Sarah Pocock. At
one point Maria Gostrey suggests that Chad ought to pay his mother a visit
and Strether answers:
“My dear lady,” Strether replied—and he had it even to
himself surprisingly ready—“my dear lady, his mother
has paid him a visit. Mrs. Newsome has been with him,
this month, with an intensity that I’m sure he has
thoroughly felt; he has lavishly entertained her, and she
has let him have her thanks. Do you suggest he shall go
back for more of them?” (298)
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Even Chad identifies Sarah with his mother. In a conversation with Strether
the pronouns become confused and Chad has to clarify the pronoun reference:
“Yes—Mother. We called it Sarah, but it comes to the same thing” (291).
Strether identifies the problem with Mrs. Pocock: her presence stifles
creativity. He discusses her with Miss Gostrey:
“That’s just her difficulty—that she doesn’t admit
surprises. It’s a fact that, I think, describes and represents
her; and it falls in with what I tell you—that she’s all, as
I’ve called it, fine cold thought. She had, to her own
mind, worked the whole thing out in advance, and
worked it out for me as well as for herself. Whenever she
has done that, you see, there’s no room left; no margin, as
it were, for any alteration. She’s filled as full, packed as
tight, as she’ll hold, and if you wish to get anything more
or different either out or in—”
“You’ve got to make over altogether the woman
herself?”
“What it comes to,” said Strether, “is that you’ve got
morally and intellectually to get rid o f her.” (299-300)
Neither Mrs. Newsome nor her ambassador, Sarah, allow any room for play;
their influence is taken as a violent affront to Strether’s independence. Maria
turns their conversation, appropriately, to a military metaphor, saying, “Fancy
having to take at the point of the bayonet a whole moral and intellectual being
or block!” and Strether replies: “It was in fact. .. what, at home, I had done.
But somehow over there I didn’t quite know it” (300). Travel, even under the
close scrutiny of Mrs. Newsome, provides Strether the space to see his
situation from a distance and to fashion his own creative response to his
environment.
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Despite the ubiquitous presence of Chad’s mother, Strether does
experience Paris as a potential space. Because travel makes him recognize
the extent of his dependence on Mrs. Newsome, it also fosters his feeling of
escape, as if only the contrast could make him realize the extent of his
desperation: “It was the difference, the difference o f being just where he was
and as he was, that formed the escape—this difference was so much greater
than he had dreamed it would be; and what he finally sat there turning over
was the strange logic o f his finding himself so free . . . He had never
expected—that was the truth of it—again to find himself young” (60). Part of
what makes him feel young is that he makes a connection between his current
trip and his youthful travels. He remembers, for instance, a palace that is no
longer in the garden of the Tuileries: “The palace was gone, Strether
remembered the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of its
site the historic sense in him might have been freely at play—the play under
which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a touched nerve. He filled out
spaces with dim symbols of scenes ...” (59). Escape from the influence of
Woollett combined with the comfort of recollections of youth, creates a space
in which Strether’s creativity comes alive. Strether reflects on how he had
been “A fortnight before one of the weariest of men” (60) but his walk in the
garden fosters a fecundity of thought.
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Gardens, in fact, play a large role in The Ambassadors as the fertility
of the garden mirrors Strether’s growing awareness. On arriving in Paris,
Strether resists the urge to read his letters, instead choosing to stroll through
the gardens. And then, when Chad suggests they go to see Gloriani, he makes
sure to mention “that the celebrated sculptor had a queer old garden” (118).
When Strether meets Gloriani, the sculptor opens up a world of possibilities.
Gloriani represents foreign territory: “Strether, in contact with that element as
he had never yet so intimately been, had the consciousness of opening to it,
for the happy instant, all the windows of his mind, of letting this rather grey
interior drink in for once the sun of a clime not marked in his old geography”
(120). While Gloriani causes Strether’s mind to open, he is finally too far
beyond the pail o f Strether’s experience, and Strether instead settles on his
connection through Chad: “He liked Gloriani, but should never see him again;
of that he was sufficiently sure. Chad accordingly, who was wonderful with
both of them, was a kind of link for hopeless fancy, an implication of
possibilities—oh if everything had been different!” (121). Again, Strether is
caught up in the conflict between “decencies and possibilities,” recognizing
the boundaries to his life. These thoughts lead Strether to make his famous
appeal to Bilham:
It’s not too late for you, on any side, and you don’t strike
me as in danger of missing the train; besides which
people can be in general pretty well trusted, of course—
with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems
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to do here—to keep an eye on the fleeting hour. All the
same don’t forget that you’re young—blessedly young; be
glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you
can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what
you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you
haven’t had that what have you had? This place and
these impressions—mild as you may find them to wind a
man up so; all my impressions of Chad and of people I’ve
seen at his place—well, have had their abundant message
for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I see it
now. I haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m
old; too old at any rate for what I see. (131-2)
This oft quoted passage that James claims served as the germ for the novel
(“Preface” 1) does more than show Strether’s awareness of his situation.
More particularly it sketches the relationship between his growing awareness
and the place in which he experienced it. James writes that the story came out
of a similar quotation, made by his friend, William Dean Howells, but “the
rest was in the place and the time and the scene they sketched” (“Preface” 2).
It is in Europe that Strether feels “the clock of his freedom ticking” and it is in
“this place and these impressions—mild as you may find them” that Strether
discovers himself. Like the “mild adventure” of Isabel Archer, Strether’s
journey creates a potent blend of familiarity and difference in which he is free
enough and safe enough to make the mental connections he failed to make in
Massachusetts.
But Strether’s final choice is not an easy one. Whereas Newman did
not have to consider his pocket-book or his family, Strether is reminded of
both. At first, Strether is like a child, enjoying a fantasy world with Maria
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Gostrey: “They now took on to his fancy, Miss Gostrey and he, the image of
the Babes in the Wood; they could trust the merciful elements to let them
continue at peace” (328). But this is only a state o f postponement and soon
enough he faces the tough decision to irrevocably break with Woollett.
Strether is moved by the need to live deliberately: “He wished not to do
anything because he had missed something else, because he was sore or sorry
or impoverished, because he was maltreated or desperate; he wished to do
everything because he was lucid and quiet, just the same for himself on all
essential points as he had ever been” (329). In other words, Strether wants to
form an original, creative response to his situation. In order to do so he also
has to choose against Miss Gostrey. After obtaining his freedom she
proposes, in an oblique way, that they stay together: “‘There’s nothing, you
know, I wouldn’t do for you... There’s nothing,’ she repeated, ‘in all the
world.’” But Strether maintains his integrity, his sense of acting not out of
desire for her, but for his own independence: “‘I know. I know. But all the
same I must go.’ He had got it in at last. ‘To be right’” (346). The ending of
this novel is open-ended. One does not know what Strether will do. But, at
the same time, he is successful at developing a creative relationship to the
world that Isabel lacks; his focus on the external—“There you are”—finally
turns into a connection of inner and outer worlds with his last statement to
Miss Gostrey—“Then there we are!” (347). With this last line he completes
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178
the process he had begun on the first page o f the novel; he has finally arrived
in Europe.
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Notes
1 See Edel 194-5, Kaplan 161, Novick 319-20.
2 See Blair.
3 Even important aspects of the novel are subtly hinted at; for instance, see
Clair, he convincingly argues that Claire de Cintre is the illegitimate child of Mrs.
Bread.
4 See, for instance, Rourke.
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Chapter Six
Playing and Reality in The American Scene
. . . an observer has early to perceive, and to
conclude on it once for all, that there will be
little for him in the American scene unless he
be ready, anywhere, everywhere, to read
‘into’ it as much as he reads out.
from The American Scene
I am moved inwardly to believe that I shall
be able not only to write the best book (of
social and pictorial and, as it were, human
observation) ever devoted to this country,
but one o f the best—or why “drag in” one
of, why not say frankly the Best?— ever
devoted to any country at all.
James on The American Scene
Henry James’s The American Scene (1907) is a peculiar book that
defies classification. The account of his return to the United States after an
absence of twenty years has been read alternately as a work of social criticism
and a work of literature, as both history and intimate autobiography.1 Auden
was a proponent of the latter, referring to the book as a “prose poem of the
first order,” and praising its reliance on subjectivity. “It is no more a guide
book,” Auden writes, “than the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is an ornithological
essay” (81). That subjectivity, in fact, has been the focus of much of the
criticism that has followed the book. Throughout The American Scene.
James employs a variety of personae, such as the “inquiring stranger,” the
“initiated native,” the “repentant absentee,” “the ancient contemplative
person,” as well as the ubiquitous “restless analyst,” and as soon as the book
was published critics contended over James’s use of multiple personae in
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rendering the scene, debating whether the shifting subjectivity resulted in an
objective or subjective impression (Hewitt 193). One may question,
therefore, whether a book with so much emphasis on self-consciousness can
rightly be classified as travel; clearly, this book is not like English Hours or A
Little Tour in France, books in which the narrative follows a more consistent
perspective. But, at the same time, The American Scene, does fit into the
category of “travel writing” because, throughout the narrative, James displays
an appreciation of both the world outside and that within. While he values
interior spaces, and seems to make himself the subject o f the narrative, he
carefully maintains a focus on the American scene as well.
But the question remains: what type of travel writing is The American
Scene? Critics that do not condemn the book as the uncontrolled ramblings of
a writer who had lost touch with his readership (as well as some that do),
agree that whatever James does in this book, it is unmistakably original.
Critics have pointed out that part of that originality results from novelistic
elements that seem to have seeped into the travel narrative. While James’s
early travel writings worked themselves into his novels and short stories
providing settings and situations, the process seems to have been reversed as
novelistic elements become apparent in The American Scene. Helen Killoran,
for instance, in “The Swiftian Journey of Henry James: Genre and
Epistemology in The American Scene” analyzes James’s protagonist,
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comparing the main character’s development with Jonathan Swift’s
protagonist in Gulliver’s Travels. Just as Gulliver descends into madness, the
protagonist of James’s book is fractured by what he sees: “The mirror o f the
American subject is so distorted by drastic change that the resulting trauma
splinters the already objectified persona into fragments” (308). Killoran
identifies this technique of fracturing the subject as Modernist and suggests a
further connection between James’s novels and The American Scene:
Altogether, this is a novel an author writes when a novel
is not possible, a negative novel of manners disguised as
a travelogue, secreting a Jamesian Gulliver... Thus The
American Scene meets the minimal requirements of
Modernism—a borderless category itself, and one James
would have abhorred, but an idea that breaks across yet
another line, the preconception of James as always the
aristocratic Victorian mannerist. (313)
Although James does seem to carry several of the prejudices of his day—
whether they be ideas about Jews, Italians, immigrants as a whole, or African-
Americans—this experimental book does, in the end, serves to undermine the
image of James as the conservative Victorian. One expects a conservative to
try and stabilize meanings, but James uses the “modem” or “postmodern”
technique (depending on how one defines those terms) of betraying anxiety
over making conclusions—the narrator continuously questions and qualifies
his observations. The American Scene is far from rigid, as James describes a
supple mind engaged in the experience of traveling.
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Before critics had the chance to point out the novelistic elements The
American Scene. James had suggested as much in a letter written to his
publisher, Colonel George Harvey, from Lenox, Massachusetts on October 21,
1904. James describes his search for a title:
If Thomas Hardy hadn’t long ago make that impossible I
should simply give the whole series o f papers the title of
The Return of the Native. But as that’s out of the
question I have found myself thinking of, and even liking
better—The Return o f the Novelist—if that doesn’t seem
too light and airy or free and easy. It describes my point
of view—the current of observation, feeling etc., that can
float me further than any other. I’m so very much more
of a Novelist than o f anything else and see all things as
such. (Letters 328)
One such novelistic element is the insistence on the protagonist as a character
who must try to interpret and understand the places through which he is
traveling; the traveler is not just soaking in the scene, drawing trite
conclusions from the top of his head; rather, he is engaged in a hermeneutic
quest in which answers must be unearthed.
Scholars have dealt with the hermeneutic quest of The American
Scene in different ways. While Killoran suggests James is anticipating
modernism, Joseph Fargnoli suggests that James was performing a version of
deconstruction; in other words, James was more intent on showing the gaps
than the connections. Because American culture was “marked with insistently
dynamic, yet often discontinuous signs, formations, and processes” (314-5),
Fargnoli argues, James employs a style that mirrors the experience of that
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184
culture: “Especially in writing about America and things American, James
became more conscious of the necessity for an element of difference, of play,
in the assigning of verbal signifiers to American cultural symbols” (314). In
other words, The American Scene may have more in common with the recent
postmodernist America (1989), by French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard,
than it has with James’s earlier travel writings. James, Fargnoli continues,
creates a literary experience in which meaning is up in the air, and only
grasped by the active reader: “Since the problems of writing cultural
interpretations are foregrounded in The American Scene, while at the same
time the observations of American details are presented, it is clear that James
had assigned a high priority to accommodating the active participation of his
reader in the search for meaning” (325). And perhaps that is what is so
remarkable about the book: aside from the often cranky, disgruntled narrator,
the narrative is exploding with other voices and interpretations.2 There are no
easy conclusions about the American scene.
While conclusions are hard to come by, the distinction between
interpretations seem to revolve around the reader’s interpretation of the
protagonist, of his attitude towards finding answers. Whether the answers
James finds are satisfying, The American Scene, despite the many bumps in
the road, is an attempt at finding them and making connections. In this way,
this travel book is deeply psychological as it follows the progress of James’s
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attempt to forge a creative relationship between himself and his native
country. In this process he is faced with two distinct problems. On the one
hand, parts o f his journey are fraught with the potential for too close a
connection and James is threatened by the possibility o f being overcome with
autobiographical reflection, of falling into the same traps he had attempted to
escape through expatriation. On the other hand, tum-of-the-century America
often seems foreign to him and he cannot sense the connection to home for
which he strives. James is looking for a place of balance, what D. W.
Winnicott, noted object-relations psychologist, calls the area of
“experiencing,” in which the equilibrium between inner and outer reality is
maintained, the place in which neither inner nor outer reality are overcome by
the other, the place which makes a creative response to the world possible.
This area is a place in which “inner reality and external life both contribute.
It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf
except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the
perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet
interrelated” (Winnicott 2). While some might argue over whether The
American Scene is sociological or autobiographical, it is more accurately
described as both. James’s travel writing, especially this book, is engaged in
what Winnicott calls the “perpetual human task,” the process of trying to form
a healthy connection between the subject and the object.
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186
The American Scene
Hemy James had always thought of himself as a traveler, but as the
nineteenth century turned into the twentieth he found himself in a rut. James
developed self-awareness as a child on the road in France, and attributed
much of his creative energy to his travels, and yet as he aged he realized that
his brother, William, was much more of a traveler than he. With this
awareness, James began to envy Americans—such as Mrs. John La Farge—
when he saw them off for their voyage back home (Edel, Henry James: The
Master 224). Edel writes:
When he turned sixty, in April of 1903, he had begun to
feel as never before the memories of childhood and
youth. “I must go before I’m too old, and, above all,
before I mind being older,” he write to William James.
To Howells he gave further proof of the longing for youth
and the older time. “I want to come, quite pathetically
and tragically—it is a passion of nostalgia.” (225)
James felt that his prospects for adventure were dwindling; he needed once
again to replenish his creative juices, a process that had typically been
accomplished through travel. Edel continues his description of James’s
mental state:
If he couldn’t bring off his American trip he would have
to settle down to oscillation between Rye and London,
London and Rye, with nothing to speak of left for him “in
the way of (the poetry of) motion.” He regarded this as
“a thin, starved, lonely, defeated, beaten prospect: in
comparison with which your own circumgyrations have
been as the adventures of Marco Polo or H. M. Stantley.”
(226-7)
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The second person to whom Henry was addressing his comment, the Marco
Polo of this quotation is Henry’s older brother, William.
But why should James choose America as his destination? “He had
never been to Spain, or Greece, or Sicily; he had had no glimpse of the East,”
writes Edel (Henry James: The Master 224). Besides the wave o f nostalgia,
James still preferred to travel to places in which he had some previous
experience, in which travel did not just cover geographical space but also the
inner spaces between past and present. Travelling to the United States would
be a form of time travel as much as anything else. James relished the
opportunity to put his personal experience on the line, writing in the preface
to The American Scene: “I would take my stand on my gathered impressions,
since it was all for them, for them only, that I returned; I would in fact go to
the stake for them—which is a sign o f the value that 1 both in particular and in
general attach to them and that I have endeavoured to preserve for them in
this transcription” (353). Not only did America offer a personal experience,
but it had changed so much that the polarities of James’s expectations had
shifted; America, expanded now to the Pacific, had become the place o f
romance:
It was ‘Europe’ that had, in very ancient days, held out to the
yearning young American some likelihood of impressions more
numerous and various and of a higher intensity than those he
might gather on the native scene; and it was doubtless in
conformity with some such desire more finely and more
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frequently to vibrate that he had originally begun to consult the
European oracle... [but] The consultation of the oracle, in a
word, the invocation of the possible thrill, was gradually to feel
its romantic essence enfeebled, shrunken and spent...
Nothing could be o f a simpler and straighter logic:
Europe had been romantic years before, because she was
different from America; wherefore America would now
be romantic because she was different from Europe. It
was for this small syllogism then to meet, practically, the
test of one's repatriation; and as the palpitating pilgrim
disembarked, in truth, he had felt it, like the rifle of a
keen sportsman, carried across his shoulder and ready for
instant use. (American Scene 654-5)
James describes himself as an overworked lover, impotent and uninspired,
who, through a change in scenery becomes once more a sharp shooter, his
idea, the syllogism, is transformed into the phallic image of the rifle, an apt
metaphor for the violence of American society, and one that also recalls
Thoreau’s dictum: “Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I
trust it would be nobler game to shoot one’s self’ (211). Again, in the
preface, James refers to his renewed desire: “I was to return with much of the
freshness of eye, outward and inward, which, with the further contribution of
a state of desire, is commonly held a precious agent of perception” (353).
Winnicott suggests that “it is creative apperception more than anything
else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living. Contrasted with
this is a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world
and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or
demanding adaptation” (65). Travel takes the traveler out of the routine and
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189
forces the conscious traveler to question the relationship between inner and
outer states. Winnicott also theorizes, based on his observations of children
that a well intentioned separation from the mother leads directly towards entry
into a symbolic and creative world: “separation is avoided by the filling in of
the potential space with creative playing, with the use of symbols, and with all
that eventually adds up to a cultural life” (109). The American Scene is all
about separation, the gap between past and present, between James and
contemporary American society, and James attempts to bridge that gap
through the symbolic world o f language and art.
Besides thinking that travel would rekindle his creative powers, James
also thought he could write a better book about America than he could about
any place else. He would not make any journey unless he could make it pay,
unless he could get a book out of it,3 and he did not feel he could put out the
type of travel writing he had in the past; his style had evolved beyond that
point. Edel writes, “He could not see himself writing little travel articles...
as he had done in his younger years” (224) and James suggests the same in the
previously mentioned letter to George Harvey: “I can’t ‘knock off things—
and I want to produce a work of art, and shall” (Letters 327-8). James further
elaborates on what he could and could not do in a letter to his friend, Edmund
Gosse, dated February 16, 1905, claiming that he could not write as he had in
the past, in the midst o f his travels:
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Alas, however, with perpetual movement and perpetual
people and very few concrete objects of nature or art to
make use of for assimilation, my brilliant chapters don’t
yet get themselves written—so little can they be notes of
the current picturesque—like one’s European notes.
They can only be notes on a social order, of vast extent,
and I see with a kind o f despair that I shall be able to do
here little more than get my saturation, soak my
intellectual sponge— reserving the squeezing-out for the
subsequent deep, ah, the so yearned for peace of Lamb
House. (Letters 351-2)
As this quotation suggests, James looked for “objects of nature or art” to help
him come to grips with the places he traveled through. He found this an easy
method in the established cultures of Europe, but finding America a different
game he would have to make his writing into the transitional object that
would harmonize all the diverse impressions he had gathered.
Winnicott theorizes that “playing,” creating the magical connections to
one’s surroundings, results from the uninvolved presence of the mother, the
sense one gets that there is a safety net without being constantly reminded of
it. James had always felt a parental presence in Europe because he was, in
large part, brought up there and despite his expatriation, his connection to the
United States remained strong through letters and frequent visitors. By the
time James returned, after his long absence, to the United States, the polarities
had been reversed. James’s connections to America were diminished, his
parents and his sister were deceased, and he apparently could not take
prolonged contact with his brother, William.4 The substitute for the comfort
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o f their presence became England. In a letter to Jessie Allen—one of his
friends in England—October 22, 1904, James writes that her letters
established a connection to the place he now called home:
Your two brave letters have been none the less a sweet
note of dear old steadily seated England (I like so to think
that she’s there, bless her grandmotherly heart), and have
helped to keep it before me that, after all these most
interesting and refreshing adventures and impressions she
will still be there for me to wreak my constant
homesicknesses (of the back of the head or the bottom of
the heart) upon. (Letters 329)
Five days later, he sent a similar letter to Edmund Gosse, betraying only
slightly more anxiety as he suggests that travel is beginning to wear on him:
I have moved from my own fireside for long years so
little (have been abroad, till now, but once, for ten years
previous) that the mere quantity of movement remains
something o f a terror and a paralysis to me—though I am
getting to brave it etc., and to like it, as the sense of
adventure, of holiday and romance, and above all of the
great so visible and observable world that stretches
before one more and more, comes through and makes the
tone of one’s days and the counterpoise of one’s
homesickness. I am, at the back of my head and at the
bottom o f my heart, transcendently homesick, and with a
sustaining private reference, all the while (at every
moment verily), to the fact that I have a tight anchorage,
a definite little downward burrow, in the ancient world—
a secret consciousness that I chink in my pocket as if it
were a fortune in a handful of silver. (Letters 331)
England, and more specifically his home, Lamb House, has taken the place of
America as his psychological security blanket, as one of the magical talismans
that makes a creative response to an often harsh and contradictory world
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possible. These letters reveal his relationship to England, but while they do
express some anxiety regarding his American travels, they do not convey the
intensity of his impressions as well as The American Scene does. As Edel
points out: “He was too busy to write many letters as he traveled. And he did
not want to seem too critical of his homeland when he wrote to his English
friends” (Letters 318).
From the beginning of The American Scene, however, James shows
the disorienting nature of his American travels. The first chapter title, “New
England: An Autumn Impression,” for instance, anticipates an innocuous
travel sketch, perhaps along the line of his earlier American sketches, such as
“Saratoga” (1870) or “Newport” (1870). But this narrative is immediately
disorienting; the reader quickly realizes that the narrative does not begin in
New England, but rather in the place of James’s youngest days, New York.
James’s initial plans had been to go to Chocorua, New Hampshire, where his
brother William had his summer home, but Henry had never been to
Chocorua and his arrival there would not provide a suitable introduction to his
book. James wants to signal from the first paragraph that The American
Scene would be as much about looking inward as it was about looking
outward. Therefore, he begins by illuminating the gaps and the transitions as
he makes his way into New York. In the first paragraph he writes,
One’s extremest youth had been full of New York, and
one was absurdly finding it again, meeting it at every
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turn, in sights, sounds, smells, even in the chaos of
confusion and change; a process under which, verily,
recognition became more interesting and more amusing
in proportion as it became more difficult, like the
spelling-out of foreign sentences of which one knows but
half the words. (357)
The entrance into New York initiates the hermeneutic quest, and it also sets
up James’s encounter with the “foreigner,” the immigrant, which takes up
much of the book. While The American Scene begins with the visual, aural
and olfactory, he also clues the reader in to the importance of language.
Although the immediate abrasions to his sensibilities are mainly visual—
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 corpulent constables, with helmets
askew, swinging their legs, in high detachment, from
coigns of contemplation; the huddled houses o f the other
time, red-faced, off their balance, almost prone, as from
too conscious an affinity with “saloon” civilization. (358)
—James translates the problem into one of language, making himself into the
foreigner who must learn a new vocabulary in order to make sense o f the
scene.
The American Scene is about learning that new language. In Europe
James had had a ready made category in which to put abrasive material:
“antique shabbiness.” But it is only with some mental gymnastics that James
can convince himself that there is value in the shabbiness of the American
scene. And James begins those mental gymnastics, finding European
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equivalents for the American scene, even before he even steps off the boat.
After noticing the quality of the sunlight, James thinks, “Yes; I could remind
myself, as I went, that Naples, that Tangiers or Constantinople has probably
nothing braver to flaunt” (358). Such comparisons create the transition by
which James can finally disembark; they create the bridge and the wave
which lead him ashore:
Such meditations, at all events, bridged over alike the
weak places o f criticism and some of the rougher ones of
my material passage. Nothing was left, for the rest of the
episode, but a kind of fluidity of appreciation—a mild,
warm wave that broke over the succession of aspects and
objects according to some odd inward rhythm, and often,
no doubt, with a violence that there was little in the
phenomena themselves flagrantly to justify. It floated
me, my wave, all that day and the next; so that I still
think tenderly—for the short backward view is already a
distance with “tone”—of the service it rendered me and
of the various perceptive penetrations, charming coves of
still blue water, that carried me up into the subject, so to
speak, and enabled me to step ashore. (358-9)
Only through the veil of metaphor does James feel in command of his
surroundings. He still worries that “there might even be a certain recklessness
in the largest surrender to impression” and that “the hour of reckoning,
obviously, would come, with . . . a greater quantity of vision, possibly, than
might fit into decent form” (359), but he had at least mastered the harbor and
set foot on American soil.
Before James made his way to Chocorua, he had to take a side-trip
down the Jersey shore to visit his publisher, Colonel George Harvey (Edel
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Henry James: The Master 235). While being driven down the Jersey
shoreline, James was overcome by the impression o f misdirected wealth,
wealth that seemingly lacked purpose, and in that vacuity he recognized his
role as a story teller; he confesses his determination to uncover a story, even if
a story is not readily apparent:
What would lurk beneath this—or indeed what wouldn’t,
what mightn’t—to thicken the plot from stage to stage
and to intensify the action? The story-seeker would be
present, quite intimately present, at the general effort—
showing, doubtless, as quite heroic in many a case—to
gouge an interest out of the vacancy, gouge it with tools
of price, even as copper and gold and diamonds are
extracted, by elaborate processes, from earth-sections of
small superficial expression. What was such an effort, on
its associated side, for the attentive mind, but a more or
less adventurous fight, carried on from scene to scene,
with fluctuations and variations, the shifting quantity of
success and failure? (366)
Thus James lays out his methodology. He plans to create connections, even if
they require a heroic effort. When the scene becomes “vacant” as the
shoreline in New Jersey appears, he plans to go more than half-way to meet it,
thereby creating a fluid relationship between playing and reality. In the
section on Philadelphia, James writes:
From the moment the critic finds himself sighing, to save
trouble in a difficult case, that the cluster of appearances
can have no sense, from that moment he begins, and quite
consciously, to go to pieces; it being the prime business
and the high honour o f the painter o f life always to make
a sense—and to make it most in proportion as the
immediate aspects are loose or confused. (579)
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Between the expectations of the traveler and his experience o f the scene, lay a
potential space that calls for a creative response. James’s charge is to play
that game of making sense without going to pieces.
This relationship between playing and reality, between the
protagonist’s quest for meaning and the reality of his subject, the surrounding
scene, is immediately evident in the mountains of New Hampshire. James,
surprising even himself, finds the region particularly “rich.” Regarding this
response, James is not led, as one might expect, into a deeper examination of
the scene; rather, he focuses on himself, the subject: “I call it rich without
compunction, despite its several poverties, caring little that half the charm, or
half the response to it, may have been shamelessly ‘subjective’; since that but
slightly shifts the ground o f the beauty of the impression” (367). On further
reflection he wonders whether the response might even be purely subjective:
“Did one by chance exaggerate, did one rhapsodize amiss, and was the
apparent superior charm o f the whole thing mainly but an accident of one’s
own situation, the state o f having happened to be deprived to excess—that is
for too long—of naturalism in quantity?” (368).
James is a bit overcome by the physical power of the American
landscape and in response he uses a series of metaphors that serve to
interiorize and control the scene. First, in an extended metaphor he describes
the forest as a furnished house: “There was the oddity—the place was
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furnished by its own good taste; its bosky ring shut it in, the two or three gaps
of the old forgotten enclosure make symmetrical doors, the sweet old stones
had the surface of grey velvet, and the scattered wild apples were like figures
in the carpet” (369). The image o f “the figure in the carpet” seems to remind
James of art, because he then describes the scene by personifying Autumn as a
landscape painter. James tries out this figure until he finally comes upon the
“right” word for the scene: “feminine” (371-2). The American landscape, he
claims, is like a woman: “It seemed to plead, the pathetic presence, to be
liked, to be loved, to be stayed with, lived with, handled with some kindness,
shown even some courtesy of admiration. What was that but the feminine
attitude?” (372). Through these domestic images James exerts his control
over the wilderness. He begins with questions about the relationship between
himself and the scene, fretting over the gaps between his attraction and what
he actually saw, and he concludes by forging a relationship through metaphor.
Chocorua, a place in which James metaphorically reconciles inner and
outer worlds, represents, in many ways, the calm before the storm. As James
continues his travels first through the Northeast and then through the South,
he is confronted by realities that are not so easily controlled. While some
places, like Newport, seem to have too much autobiographical association for
clear analysis, other places, like New York, provide James with too much
difference, as he is confronted by disconcerting elements, such as
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architectural “progress,” technology, and most troubling of all, immigrants.
In Newport James finds himself too close to his subject: “Newport, on my
finding myself back there, threatened me sharply, quite at first, with that
predicament at which I have glanced in another connection or two—the felt
condition of having known it too well and loved it too much for description or
definition” (528). James realized that good travel writing resulted from the
interplay between inner and outer worlds, and that such interplay required
space as well as commitment. His relationship with Newport lacked the
former
It sometimes uncomfortably happens for a writer,
consulting his remembrance, that he remembers too
much and finds himself knowing his subject too well;
which is but the case of the bottle too full for the wine to
start. There has to be room for the air to circulate
between one’s impressions, between the parts of one’s
knowledge, since it is the air, or call it the intervals on
the sea of one’s ignorance, of one’s indifference, that sets
these floating fragments into motion. (541)
His impressions of Newport lack that air of indifference. James further
describes his intimacy with Newport through the metaphor of an outstretched
hand:
it had simply lain there like a little bare, white, open
hand, with slightly-parted fingers, for the observer with a
presumed sense for hands to take or to leave. The
observer with a real sense never failed to pay this image
the tribute of quite tenderly grasping the hand, and even
of raising it, delicately, to his lips; having no less, at the
same time, the instinct of not shaking it too hard, and that
above all of never putting it to any rough work. (528-9)
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With this remarkably sensual image James proposes to sidestep the aggressive
interpretations that precede and succeed the section on Newport. Rather he
escapes into the subjective, offering little insight into the town.
But, while James is too close to parts of the American scene, the real
test for the “restless analyst” is dealing with the impression that things have
changed too quickly, that America has become a foreign country to him. He
is struck, for instance, by the architectural changes that disorient the tourist.
The skyscrapers in New York create a feeling of anomie; the skyline is
described as giving the impression of both a pin-cushion and a cage (422).
James is particularly moved, however, not by construction, but by the
destruction of the house in which he was bom:
This was the snub, for the complacency of retrospect,
that, whereas the inner sense had positively erected there
for its private contemplation a commemorative mural
tablet, the very wall that should have bourne this
inscription had been smashed as for demonstration that
tablets, in New York, are unthinkable. (431)
James had mentally erected a tablet to commemorate his place o f birth, but
then found America an inhospitable place for such markers of the past.5
Besides the destruction o f his childhood house, New York presents
other architectural changes that dismay James—“new landmarks crushing the
old quite as violent children stamp on snails and caterpillars” (423)—but he is
even more dismayed by new methods of transportation, such as the motorcar,
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the railroad, the elevator and the streetcars. Perhaps one o f the most original
elements of The American Scene is the depiction of travel by automobile.6
The beginning chapters of the book are disorienting, as James seems to jump
from one place to another with little transition. It is not until the “motor”
breaks down in Hudson, New York, that part of the reason for this bumpy ride
becomes clear, only then does it become clear that he was being transported
by automobile. With the break-down o f the car, James claims, he finally
finds some peace: “The best here, to speak of, was that the motor underwent
repair and that its occupants foraged for dinner—finding it indeed excellently
at a quiet cook-shop, about the middle of the long-drawn way, after we had
encountered coldness at the door of the main hotel by reason of our French
poodle” (398). James finds the railroad only slightly less disorienting. Soon
after his stop in Hudson, James visits the residence of Washington Irving, and
is swept by a wave of nostalgia—an appropriate response in the birthplace of
Rip Van Winkle—and he focuses an attack against that other modem
convenience, the railroad:
It has taken our ugly era to thrust in the railroad at the
foot o f the slope, among the masking trees; the railroad
that is part, exactly, of the pomp and circumstance, the
quickened pace, the heightened fever, the narrowed
margin expressed within the veiy frame o f the present
picture . . . I had hoped not to have to name the
railroad—it seems so to give away my case. (485)
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James does not like the changes to the not so Sleepy Hollow. Trains disorient
the traveler, narrowing the margin, or, in other words, limiting the traveler’s
freedom as he or she is moved along a determined track to the so called
“highlights.” Besides trains and motorcars, he also worries about elevators
which he sees as another time saving device that only speaks to the American
fascination with making money:
To wait, perpetually, in a human bunch, in order to be
hustled, under military drill, the imperative order to ‘step
lively,’ into some tight mechanic receptacle, fearfully and
wonderfully working, is conceivable, no doubt, as a sad
liability of our nature, but represents surely, when
cherished and sacrificed to, a strange perversion of
sympathies and ideals. (509-10)
Not only does the elevator rob us o f the romance of old staircases, but it also
creates an “insistence on gregarious ways only,” suggesting that with the loss
of private space, Americans are only cheerful because they are forced to be.
Like elevators, streetcars were, for James, intolerably public spaces.
The need for private spaces is a recurring concern for the protagonist of The
American Scene: for instance, he complains about the new Boston library
which lacks, he suggests, appropriate places to get away from the crowd, a
situation which he describes as an “absence of penetralia.” James writes:
“social democracies are unfriendly to the preservation of penetralia: so that
when penetralia are of the essence, as in a place of study and meditation, they
inevitably go to the wall” (560). Perhaps one of the reasons James sought out
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such private space was to soothe his nerves which had been so jarred by riding
the streetcars. While James questioned the role of cars, trains and elevators
because of what they suggested about American priorities, his reaction to the
streetcars, was more visceral. He decries the “foreign element”:
The carful, again and again, is a foreign carful; a row of
faces, up and down, testifying, without exception, to
alienism unmistakable, alienism undisguised and
unashamed. . . 1 remember observing how, in the
Broadway and the Bowery conveyances in especial, they
tended, almost alike, to make the observer gasp with the
sense of isolation. It was not for this that the observer on
whose behalf I more particularly write had sought to take
up again the sweet sense of the natal air. (459-60)
One would think that, as an expatriate, James would have had plenty of
experience feeling like an outsider, but also appears to have harbored a
romantic notion that he was still an American, that he would feel like an
insider on this trip. This notion seemed to be squashed by his ride upon the
streetcar.
With the introduction of the recent immigrants the reader confronts an
unpleasant aspect of James’s narrative, his vituperative attack upon the
“alien.” At times, James how he might escape the experience of the
foreigner, but he finds that the foreigner’s voice cannot be ignored. For
instance, in discussing the immigrant, James creates a dichotomy between the
discordant world o f tum-of-the-century New York and Boston and the
harmonious strains o f his memory. He recognizes that the only escape from
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the immigrant was nostalgia—“There was no escape from the ubiquitous alien
into the future, or even into the present; there was an escape but into the past”
(428). Following this plan of escape, he is momentarily successful at quieting
the foreign voice: “I like indeed to think of my relation to New York as, in
that manner, almost inexpressibly intimate, and as hence making, for daily
sensation, a keyboard as continuous, and as free from hard transitions, as if
swept by the fingers of a master-pianist” (452). But while James tries to be
the “master-pianist” manipulating impressions, The American Scene is filled
with heteroglossia; one page after smoothing out the hard transitions, James
presents the reader with an image that is jarring in its imagery. When he sees
Italian immigrants in Central Park, he reflects: “Is not the universal sauce
essentially his sauce, and do we not feel ourselves feeding, half the time, from
the ladle, as greasy as he chooses to leave it for us, that he holds out?” (453).
James realizes he is no longer in Chocorua, that he cannot stop himself from
feeding from the “greasy ladle”; everywhere he turns he is accosted by voices
he cannot quiet.
Despite his discomfort, James does not run away from such voices.
Rather, he makes it a point to visit places in which one expects to see “the
foreign,” such as Ellis Island. It is here that he recognizes the strength of the
impression made by the “alien”—“Other impressions might come and go, but
this affirmed claim of the alien, however immeasurably alien, to share in
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one’s supreme relation was everywhere the fixed element, the reminder not to
be dodged” (427). Later, at the request o f a friend, he also visits the Jewish
ghetto, a place in which, James writes, people gather “for race” and not “for
reason” (465). But, despite his fascination with the demographic changes of
the United States, or perhaps because of them, much of the book is spent in
trying to imagine an America free of Eastern European immigrants.
In New York, James suspects the experience o f the alien cannot be
escaped, but he does expect to find some relief in New England, relief that
does not come. For instance, James travels through historical Massachusetts,
visiting Concord and Salem, and finds that when he asks directions for a
historical landmark, he once again is confronted with the alien:
So, inevitably, at Salem, when, wandering perhaps astray,
I asked my way to the House of the Seven Gables, the
young man I had overtaken was true to his nature; he
stared at me as a remorseless Italian—as remorseless, at
least, as six months of Salem could leave him. On that
spot, in that air, I confess, it was a particular shock to me
to be once more, with my so good general intention, so
‘put off; though, if my young man but glared frank
ignorance o f the monument I named, he left me at least
with the interest of wondering how the native estimate of
it as a romantic ruin might strike a taste formed for such
features by the landscape of Italy. (572)
Once again, James is shocked by a foreign experience in what he thought to
be his own country, particularly noteworthy here, however, is the response he
fashions towards this event. He transports the scene from the streets of Salem
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to the “landscape of Italy,” figuratively deporting the Italian-American back
where he belongs.
This figure lessens his shock for a while, but he still hopes for a more
permanent solution, a solution he appears to find in the example of
Philadelphia, a closed and discriminating society. Philadelphia is a place in
which he feels he can more successfully extract the “foreign element” from
his view:
I at all events here gave myself up to the vision—that of
the vast, firm chess-board, the immeasurable spread of
little squares, covered all over by perfect Philadelphians.
It was an image, in face of some of the other features of
the view, dissimilar to any by which one had ever in
one's life been assaulted; and this elimination of the
foreign element has been what was required to make it
consummate. (586)
But while this image is “perfect” and “consummate” it is also a violent, black
and white image lacking in subtly, surely an assault upon James’s
sensibilities. And sure enough, James begins to see through his initial trope.
This image, this “little masterpiece of the creative imagination,” is ironic—
portraying the City of Brotherly Love as built on exclusion—and self-
conscious, and he knows the image is partial, at best: “I knew, all the while,
that there was something more, and different, and less beatific, under and
behind the happy appearance I grasped” (587).
After his journey to Philadelphia, James turns to the South, feeling that
he is in for a change, in for, as he puts it, “a conversion,. . . a return, on the
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part of that soul, from a comparatively grim Theistic faith to the ineradicable
principle of Paganism” (603-4). He first has this impression in Baltimore, a
town that James finds “inordinately amiable,” a town in which he feels safe:
“If my sensibility yielded so completely to Baltimore, however, I should add,
this was no doubt partly because the air seemed from the first to breathe upon
it a pledge of no bruises” (608). As Winnicott suggests, it is only with a sense
of undemanding security, a mother that is not hovering, that the child feels
safe enough to play; James’s feelings of security in Baltimore translate into an
awareness of his own creative powers. James is at ends to cite the particular
felicities of Baltimore, but he does reflect on the process of travel writing:
The moral o f this [not being able to cite particulars] was
precious—that of the fine impunity with which, if one but
had sensibility, the ciphering could be neglected, and in
fact almost contemned: always, that is (and only) with
one’s finer wits about one. Without them one was at best,
really, nowhere—even with ‘items’ by the thousand; so
that the place became, quite adorably, a lesson in the use
of that resource. It would be ‘no good’ to a journalist—
for he is nowhere, ever, without his items; but it would be
everything, always, to the mere restless analyst. He might
by its aid stand against all comers; and this alike in
pleasure and in pain, in the bruised or in the soothed
condition. That was the real way to work things out, and
to feel it so brought home would by itself sufficiently
crown this particular small pilgrimage. (607-8)
This quotation presents a clear conception of the type o f travel writing James
valued; he did not care for reporting, presenting a list of items, but sees that
the “real way to work things out” is to pay attention to one’s self. As soon as
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James has this insight he metaphorically gets on his horse and rides: “ ... the
cunning of the restless analyst is essentially such that, with friction long
enough in abeyance to leave him a start, he is already astride of his happier
thesis, seated firm, having ‘elected’ to be undismountable, and riding it as
hard as it will go” (608). The friction had been James’s awareness of the
conflict between his expectations of the North, which were many, and his
experience of it.
The South seems, at first, like the perfect antidote to the twentieth
century. Earlier in the narrative, for instance, James had expressed concern
about the growing power of women and the decline in private male spaces,
but then finds that Washington offers an anomaly, an example of “Man’s
socially ‘existing’” (640-1). Yet, despite this somewhat comforting discovery
James’s experience of the South is not all peaches and cream. He is
disconcerted, for example, when he finds himself stretching to find “interest”:
There is a thing called interest that has to be produced for
him—positively as if he were a rabid usurer with a clutch
of his imperilled bond. He has seen again and again how
the most expensive effort often fails to lead up to interest,
and he has seen how it may bloom in soil of no more
worth than so many layers of dust and ashes. He has
learnt in fact—he leams greatly in America—to mistrust
any plea for it directly made by money, which operates
too often as the great puffing motor-car framed for
whirling him, in his dismay, quite away from it. (648)
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James suggests that he is beginning to grasp, amidst the various claims for his
attention, for something o f value, yet he is left empty-handed. He conveys a
similar image o f desperation when he arrives in Savannah:
Where was the charm?— if it wasn’t already, supremely, in
the air, the latitude, the season, as well as in the
imagination of the pilgrim capable not only of squeezing
a sense from the important city on these easy terms and
with that desperate economy, but o f reading heaven
knows what installment of romance into a mere railroad
matter. (707)
He is, in a sense, working overtime to read “romance into a mere railroad
matter.”
One reason James tried so hard to find interest is that many aspects of
the South troubled him. While the South does represent freedom from the
foreign, James finds that they still have plenty o f home-grown horrors. James
does, at times, offer offensive racial remarks, such as when he expresses
surprise at not finding southern African-Americans to be the natural servants
he had always heard about:
One had counted, with some eagerness, in moving southward,
on the virtual opposite—on finding this deficiency,
encountered right and left at the North, beautifully corrected;
one had remembered the old Southern tradition, the house alive
with the scramble of young darkies for the honour of fetching
and carrying; and one was to recognize, no doubt, at the worst,
its melancholy ghost. (702)
But just as often as James offers such troubling reflections, he also recognizes
his own participation in an unequal, oppressive system. On the road from
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209
Richmond to Charleston, noticing a few whites and more blacks, he see the
lack of opportunity for the people in the South:
the grimness with which, as by a hard inexorable fate, so
many things were ruled out, fixed itself most perhaps as
the impression of the spectator enjoying from his
supreme seat of ease his extraordinary, his awful modem
privilege o f this detached yet concentrated stare at the
misery of the subject populations. (681)
He sees himself from the perspective of the poor southerners who are made to
feel their despair more acutely when the affluent traveler happens by. In the
South, seemingly harmless observations continuously erupt into nightmarish
insights. For instance, James meets a Southern man in the Confederate
Museum in Richmond and he is first drawn to him, but then James is
overcome with the image o f what this seemingly benign young man would
like to do to Southern blacks: “he wouldn’t have hurt a Northern fly, there
were things (ah, we had touched on some of these!) that, all fair, engaging,
smiling, as he stood there, he would have done to a Southern negro” (673).
And then, of course, there are those reminders of the Civil War. While
visiting a Richmond battlefield, James creates the impression of scratching
among the bones of the dead: “They were buried, if one would, in the
‘deposit’—where the restless analyst might scratch, all tenderly, to find them”
(669).
The American Scene is full of the voices that made James
uncomfortable, causing many to see him as an effete sophisticate who could
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210
not handle the freedoms of his native country. But James is not so thin
skinned. Throughout the book he throws himself into the life around him.
One cannot say he kept an open mind. James, like any good modernist, would
challenge the idea of the “open mind” as a false construct. James focuses,
rather, on the interplay between his expectations and the world he moved
through. His impressions are formed on the crest of the wave between playing
and reality. James suggest as much when he comments upon the feeling of
travel:
There always comes, to any traveller who doesn’t depart
and arrive with the mere security and punctuality of a
registered letter, some moment for his beginning to feel
within him—it happens under some particular touch—the
finer vibration o f a sense of the real thing. He thus
knows it when it comes, and it has the great value that it
never need fail. (711)
The traveler who cares about reality needs to pay attention to inner states if he
is to get a “sense of the real thing.” When travel is self-conscious, the traveler
will be engaged in the interplay between inner and outer states, resulting in a
feeling that he or she is forging a creative response to the world. Towards the
end of The American Scene. James thinks back upon his method o f travel:
So, therefore, one seemed destined a bit incoherently to
proceed; asking one’s self again and again what the play
would have been without the scenery, sometimes ‘even
such’ scenery, and then once more not quite seeing why
such scenery (in especial) should propose to put one off
with so little of a play. The thing, absolutely,
everywhere, was to provide one’s own play; anything,
everything make scenery for that, and the recurrence of
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211
such questions make scenery most of all. I remember no
moment, over the land, when the mere Pullman itself
didn’t overarch my observations as a positive temple of
the drama, and when the comedy and the tragedy of
manners didn’t, under its dome, hold me raptly attent.
(712-13)
Despite the inconveniences, the often rude company, the insights into social
problems, travel opens a new creative world for James. He does not find
himself in religion; rather it is the Pullman that is his temple. It is the attempt
to ride the cusp where one’s self touches the world, where the rubber meets
the road, that holds James “raptly attent.” Travel is the connection between
past and present selves, linking the “dawdling and gaping” of his youth to the
rapt attention of the mature James, creating a potential space in which James
can, without losing himself, gain the world.
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212
Notes
1 See Posnock and Benert for examples of The American Scene read as
social criticism.
2 Benert suggests James subverts the form of the travelogue “in an almost
Bakhtinian way” (333-4).
3 Aside from publishing his travel impressions, James also had the notion
that he wanted to write one or two more “American” novels (Edel, Henry James:
The Master 229), although, after beginning the revisions of his works for the New
York Edition, James did not have time to write those novels; he did, however, get
the inspiration for the short story, “The Jolly Comer.”
4 See Edel, Henry James: A Life (614).
3 Edel notes that “In 1966 such a tablet was unveiled on the spot where the
Brown Building o f New York University now stands” (Henry James: The Master
290).
6 On a blurb for the recent reissue o f Theodore Dreiser’s Hoosier Holiday
(1917), it is announced as the first of the great American automobile adventures,
but The American Scene which precedes it certainly has much about the “motor”
as well.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
213
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Creator
Vieira, Gregory Curtis
(author)
Core Title
"The nameless force at play": The psychology of travel in the writings of Henry James
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
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English
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
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Tag
literature, American,literature, English,OAI-PMH Harvest
Language
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Gottesman, Ronald (
committee chair
), Gustafson, Tim (
committee member
), Lazar, Moshe (
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