Henry’s James
In August of 1904, after more than
two decades abroad, the sixty-year-old Henry James returned to the United
States for a year. While William James had famously remarked that his brother
was "a native of the James family" (W James 517), with little else in the way of national
affiliation, Henry considered himself as American as ever after his twenty
years in Europe. The book he wrote about his American journey was titled The American Scene only because James's
first choice had been taken; he would have preferred to call it The Return of the Native.[1] But
James's sense of himself as a native, as one at home in the United States, was
shaken by his alienating experience of the American public, both as readers and
as fellow citizens. Today I want to consider ways in which James struggled to
preserve a secure sense of himself, the private identity he called "my me,"[2] in the midst of disorienting encounters
with the American press and the American people -- encounters, I argue, that
share a certain uncanny logic.
The American press staged a lively
debate over the meaning of Henry James, in reviews of The Golden Bowl and of the early chapters of The American Scene, accounts of James's lecture appearances, cartoons
of the elusive "Master," and parodies of his ornate late style. The
name "Henry James" came to serve as a kind of shorthand for a complex
nexus of anxieties about ethics, art, and nationhood. James's writing and life
gave rise to debates about morality (was he decadent or just sophisticated?),
manliness (was he effeminate or just sensitive?), and modernity (was he an
aristocratic anachronism or was he avant-garde?), all entangled with the
question of James's supposed patriotism or lack of it. James himself
experienced the press attention paid him as an assault, and felt a visceral
sense of violation at the way that journalists used him to define their own
positions in debates that often meant little to him. He felt like a freak,
ogled for the benefit and entertainment of the American crowd: "only those
can understand," he maintained, "who have been terrified &
paralyzed absentees restored hither after long years & with every one
wanting to see (or to deny) the strawberry marks on different parts of their persons."[3] His distinguishing marks were, he
suggested, in the eye of the beholder, to be seen or denied at will, and as
such did more to distinguish the onlookers than the absentee. "Henry
James," equally serviceable as an accolade (the great artist) or an
indictment (the great pretender), meant, in the end, whatever the American
press wanted it to mean.
James was offered a number of
opportunities to exercise some control over his representation, to address his
American public directly, but he rebuffed almost every journalistic advance.
One contemporary recounted the story of a reporter who tried to corner James in
an impromptu interview:
Having formed the project of making a
"feature" of this gentleman for a Sunday edition, the reporter had
introduced himself to the novelist under a social guise and then had thrown off
the mask. Mr. James, it appeared, objected to this not-unheard-of manoeuvre,
saying that he was more used to life in England, where a gentleman’s privacy
was not intruded upon. The interviewer, according to his own account, then
proceeded to "talk to" Mr. James "like a Dutch uncle,"
plainly informing him that such an attitude was un-American; that in this
country people wanted to know the jockey on the racer, the man behind the gun
(I speak by the card), and that if they were so obliging as to buy and read
your books it was only fair to humor their harmless inquisitiveness; that,
moreover, it helped along your own affairs -- to put it crudely, it advertised
you. (Dwight 168)
The
reporter was rude, but he was right. If James were really to stage a major
commercial comeback in the United States, he would have to advertise himself,
and everywhere he went he met journalists who offered him what we would call
"free publicity." To James, there was no such thing; personal
publicity always exacted a price. As newspaper readers across the country
entertained themselves with debates and cartoons inspired by him, James
remained as aloof as he possibly could.
His aversion to publicity sprang
from his insistence that the private lives of artists were, in every important
respect, beside the point: a belief reflected in his attack on the cult of
literary celebrity in his American lecture "The Lesson of Balzac."
His reluctance to read his own press was also a result of his intense shyness
and sensitivity to ridicule; Edith Wharton recalled that "the effect of
letting him know that any of his writings had been parodied" was "disastrous"
(Wharton 189).
He distrusted the press so
thoroughly that he lifted his ban on interviews only twice during his ten-month
American tour: once, when Florence Brooks of the New York Herald Tribune arrived unannounced on William James’s New
Hampshire doorstep, having travelled hundreds of miles with a letter of
introduction from the Scribners in her hand; the second time, when he very
grudgingly allowed Witter Bynner to reconstruct a publishable "interview"
out of a prior conversation the young poet had had with James.
Bynner’s request for permission to
piece together from his notes a "more or less connected monologue"
(Bynner 26) of Jamesian remarks prompted James into a more spontaneous
outburst:
I have a constituted and systematic
indisposition to 'having anything to do,' myself, personally, with anything in
the nature of an interview, report, reverberation; that is to adopting,
endorsing, or in any way otherwise taking to myself, anything that anyone may
be presumed to have contrived to gouge, as it were, out of me. It has, for me,
nothing to do with me -- my me at
all; but only with the other person’s equivalent for that mystery, whatever it
may be; and thereby his little affair
exclusively.[4]
James’s
vision of himself as a "mystery," inaccessible to journalistic
inquest, was in some sense his last romance; he located in his own person those
elusive qualities that "we never can
directly know" (AM xvi), the
condition of romance as he would define it in his preface to The American. While James experimented
in his American letters and journals with different dramatic personae, trying "to
make myself a notion of how, and where, and even what, I was" (HJL 4 331), in the end, Henry James refused to settle on
a single identity in the United States. He left the question open to himself
and closed to the American press.
James’s careful distinction of
"my me" from the public
figure he resembled, his recoil from any "equivalent" of himself
constituted or narrated by another, reflects what we might call the celebrity
uncanny: the anxiety experienced by a subject when a media-created figment
appears to represent (or reproduce) the private self. Freud defines the unheimlich, or uncanny, as the sensation
produced when a person’s sense of identity or integrity is threatened by a
confrontation with something supposedly other
which also exhibits, disturbingly, aspects of the self: "the uncanny is
that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long
familiar" (Freud 220). The classic example is Freud's description of
encountering an intruder in his railway compartment only to discover that he is
looking at himself reflected in a mirror. James would define this sensation as
"the note . . . of the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type
of the normal and easy" (AD xxiv).
His own uncanny encounters in the United States were not limited to the
experience of the mass-produced images and versions of himself which followed
him, as a literary celebrity, across the country. James's anxiety about his
public image was matched by an anxiety about the "public" itself: he
experienced a number of uncanny encounters with other Americans -- or American
others -- in whom he perceived a disturbing likeness to himself. I'd like to
connect Henry’s James, the "my
me" he sought to protect from the glare of the media spotlight, to another
cherished and embattled aspect of his identity: James’s sense of himself as an
American.
What if we posit an analogy between
James's desire to protect his sense of himself as a person and his desire to
protect his sense of himself as a "native"? I draw this analogy
because I think that the model of the uncanny may be a particularly useful way
to think about James's experience of national identity, because it does not
assume -- as many readers of James's American writings do -- that a moment of
identification with another necessarily produces feelings of sympathy or
solidarity. Priscilla Wald has recently connected the uncanny anxiety described
by Freud to the experience of national identity when she observes that
"the uncanny sends us home to the discovery that ‘home’ is not what or
where we think it is and that we, by extension, are not who or what we think we
are" (Wald 7). James,
a "native" who tried to come home, was no stranger to that
experience, especially as it related to what he called the "germ of a
‘public’" (AS 105) represented
by the alien. Throughout his American journey, James had double-edged
encounters with recent immigrants who made him feel like a "person who has
had an apparition, seen a ghost in his supposedly safe old house" (AS 66). He experienced these encounters
as uncanny moments of recognition, both finding himself in the alien and
recoiling from that identification.
The American Scene has
long provided fodder for those seeking to dismiss James as an anti-Semitic,
Anglo-Saxon snob: when he likens New York's Lower East Side to "some vast
sallow aquarium in which innumerable fish, of overdeveloped proboscis . . .
bump together, forever, amid heaped spoils of the sea" (AS 100), it's hard not to gasp or at
least grimace.[5] And when James tells how he leaned over the
spectators’ balcony at Ellis Island to watch the arriving immigrants searched
and sorted, he describes the sight of the huddled masses in terms of the
Biblical fall itself:
I think indeed that the simplest account of
the action of Ellis Island on the spirit of any sensitive citizen who may have
happened to 'look in' is that he comes back from his visit not at all the same
person that he went. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge, and the taste will
be forever in his mouth. . . . I like to think of him, I positively have to
think of him, as going about ever afterwards with a new look, for those who can
see it, on his face, the outward sign of the new chill in his heart. (AS 66)
To
know the immigrant, it would seem, is to know death itself.
But while James struggles with the
"sense of dispossession" (AS 67)
that these new Americans produce in him, he also sees something of himself in
the alien. His visit to Ellis Island unfolds as a primal scene, in which the
repressed alien origin of James's own identity is shockingly revealed:
"Who and what is an alien, when it comes to that, in a country peopled
from the first under the jealous eye of history?" (AS 95). James is honest enough to recognize that the difference
between himself and the eastern and southern Europeans streaming through
immigration is a matter of degree, not of kind: James's own grandfather had
been off the boat from Ireland at the age of eighteen. Just as the aliens
become Americans at Ellis Island, the American James discovers (or recovers)
himself as an alien there: the absolute distance between spectators' balcony
and immigrants' floor collapses. James is struck not merely by his difference
from the crowd below, but by his similarity to them.
That similarity extends further:
James the "native" very often feels like an alien in the modern
United States. He shares the curiosity and bewilderment of the new immigrants,
and he applauds the challenge that "the obstinate, the unconverted
residuum" (AS 95) of the Old
World poses to what he considers the homogeneous American -- or Americanized --
scene. James looks to the alien to bring certain "positive
properties" (AS 98) to the life
of the United States: the social graces of the Italians, for instance, and the
historical consciousness of the Jews. On the Lower East Side of New York, James
finds a quiet immigrant which impresses him more than any "gilded and
guarded 'private room,'" because it reflects a genuine sense of taste and
proportion, rather than a frantic expenditure of money; its owner and patrons
create a sense of tranquillity with only "a few tables and chairs, a few
coffee-cups and boxes of dominoes" (AS
152). He pays the Bowery his highest compliment when he calls it one of
"the real triumphs of art" (AS 152),
and he is fascinated by the owner, who speaks only a few words of "the
current American" (AS 152), and
yet somehow manages to check the excesses of his adopted culture. James finds,
in the alien, a reflection of himself as artist and cultural critic.
The complexity of James's response
to the new Americans he encountered has been, over the past decade, more widely
acknowledged. Critics such as Ross Posnock, Sara Blair, and Beverly Haviland
have rightly called into question the caricature of James as a simple
xenophobe, a genteel aesthete who surveyed modernity from the window of his
ivory tower and shuddered with distaste. Certainly, James's efforts to learn
more about the alien went far beyond what was socially expected of him; try to
imagine his friend Henry Adams, or Edith Wharton, making a day of it at Ellis
Island, or spending an evening in the Yiddish theaters and of the Lower East
Side. (You can't, because they wouldn't.) James's identification with the
immigrants is deep and real and complicated, and we've been lucky, in recent
years, to have benefitted from such nuanced readings of that relationship. The
reason I introduce the model of the uncanny, as a way of thinking about James's
response to the alien, is that the uncanny forces the awareness that
identification, in itself, does not inevitably produce a positive or
progressive reaction. Sometimes, of course, we see ourselves in others and are
sympathetically drawn to them as a result, but other times, we see ourselves in
others and panic, shrinking and denying the resemblance that unnerves us. It's
possible to acknowledge James's identification with the alien, and the moments
of genuine sympathy that identification produces, without concluding that every
time James suggests or acknowledges some similarity between himself and the
newest Americans he is expressing his solidarity with them.
If the critical pendulum has swung
from The American Scene as xenophobic
screed to The American Scene as
trans-national brief, it may be time to for it to swing a bit back. I worry
that in our haste to defend James, we sometimes ignore the tenor of his text;
it's hard for me to see him luxuriating in "sensuous contingency"
(Posnock 154) with the unwashed aliens, as Ross Posnock claims, and I don't
think that the cumulative impact of James's zoological metaphors can be
finessed away. I can't agree, for instance, with Beverly Haviland when she
reads James's account of the Lower East Side tenements as an instance of his
superior delicacy. James writes: "The very name of architecture perishes,
for the fire-escapes look like abashed afterthoughts, staircases and
communications forgotten in the construction; but the inhabitants lead, like
the squirrels and monkeys, all the merrier life" (AS 102). Haviland suggests that the overcrowded conditions
"may well have shocked James enough to have impelled him to try to depict
this appalling situation in positive and playful terms rather than express his
dismay" (Haviland 151), but, to my mind, the effect of calling the
inhabitants "merry" and likening them to contented squirrels and
monkeys is not to show sympathy for their plight and consideration for their
feelings, but to stress a fundamental difference
between them and people like James, who prefer their architecture finished,
and live inside it, protected from the public eye. Here, I think, we witness
the recoil of Henry's James, "my me,"
the native, not only from the conditions of American publicity but from his
uneasy identification with the American public itself.
Works Cited
Bynner, Witter. "On Henry James's
Centennial: Lasting Impressions of a Great American Writer." Saturday Review of Literature (22 May
1943): 23+.
Dwight, H.G. "Henry James -- In His Own
Country," part one. Putnam’s Monthly
2:2 (May 1907): 164-70.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, with Anna
Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson, vol. 17 (1917-1919), An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press and
the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1955; reprint, 1986. 217-56.
Haviland, Beverly. Henry James's Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American
Scene. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
James, Henry. The Altar of the the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and
Other Tales (AD). The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol.
17. New York: Scribner's, 1909.
---. The
American (AM). The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol.
2. New York: Scribner's, 1907.
---. The
American Scene (AS). New
York: Penguin Books, 1994.
---. Henry
James Letters (HJL), volumes 1-4 , ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University,
1974-84.
James, William. The Correspondence of William James: Volume 3, William and Henry
1897-1910, ed. Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1994.
Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge
of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Wald, Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1995.
Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: Scribner's, 1981.
[1] "If Thomas Hardy hadn’t long ago made that impossible I should simply give the whole series of papers the title of The Return of the Native." (HJL 4 328).
[2] Letter to Witter Bynner, 24 December 1904. Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1891.19: 14.
[3] Letter to Mary Cadwalader Jones, 23 October 1904. Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1094:795.