Books: Return of the Expatriate

THE AMERICAN SCENE (501 pp.)—Henry James, with an introduction by W. H. Auden—Scribner’s ($5).

When Henry James returned to the U.S. for a long visit in 1904, he had been an expatriate for more than a quarter of a century. He had communed with Europe and had brought the art of the novel to a perfection probably unequaled since. The American Scene, his impressions of the U.S. (actually only the eastern seaboard) represents the Master at the height of his cultivation, endlessly receptive, endlessly scrupulous, endlessly amused.

It is clear that beneath his urbanity he was deeply excited by his native land. The excitement is plainest in James’s reflections on Richmond, which the aging genius approached with a young attitude: he looked for tragic poetry in the air of the Confederate capital. James’s actual impression of Richmond—seen in all its poverty under a dreary winter snowfall— gains great force by contrast.

A Stopped Omnibus. Near the old Statehouse of the Confederacy he noted “one of those decent and dumb American churches which are so strangely possessed of the secret of minimizing, to the casual eye, the general pretension of churches

“Looking for the most part no more established or seated than a stopped omnibus, they are reduced to the inveterate bourgeois level (that of private, accommodated pretensions merely) and fatally despoiled of the fine old ecclesiastical arrogance.”

In Washington, likewise, “numberless things are represented, and one interest after the other counts itself in; the great Congressional Library crowns the hill beside the Capitol, the Departments and Institutes cover their acres and square their shoulders, the Obelisk to the memory of Washington climbs still higher; but something is absent more even than these masses are present—till it at last occurs to you that the existence of a religious faith on the part of the people is not even remotely suggested.”

And in general: “The field of American life is as bare of the Church as a billiard-table of a centerpiece; a truth that the myriad little structures ‘attended’ on Sundays and on the ‘off’ evenings of their ‘sociables’ proclaim as with the audible sound of the roaring of a million mice.”

James refused to draw any large conclusions about what this would mean for the U.S. and the world in the future. Wrote he: “When an ancient treasure of precious vessels, overscored with glowing gems and wrought, artistically, into wondrous shapes, has, by a prodigious process, been converted, through a vast community, into the small change, the simple circulating medium of dollars and ‘nickels,’ we can only say that the consequent permeation will be of values of anew order. Of what order we must wait to see.”

The James. The American Scene, classic as it appears, might have been expected to compete at once with other classics like Bryce’s American Commonwealth for a place in U.S. bookshelves and meditations. But it didn’t. Since Harper’s published it in 1907, it has shared in the long neglect and inaccessibility of James’s work. It now appears—at perhaps the tail end of a two-year-old Henry James “revival”* with an introduction by an English writer of notable talent, Poet W. H. Auden, whose expatriation is the reverse of James’s.

It took many years before a public nerved to the crankier literary difficulties of Proust and Joyce could understand the intense beauty and relevance of James’s mature novels (The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove). Along with the other reprints, anthologies and critical studies of the James revival, The American Scene should encourage more & more U.S. readers to turn to his writing, as perhaps toward the peace of greatness.

*Principal items:

The Great Short Novels of Henry James (812 pp.)—Edited by Philip Rahv—Dial ($4).

Stones of Writers and Artists (346 pp.) —Edited by F. 0. Matthiessen—New Directions ($3.50).

The Short Stories of Henry James (644 pp.) —Selected by Clifton Fadiman—Random House ($3)

Henry James: The Major Phase (190 pp.)—F.O. Matthiessen—Oxford ($2.50).

The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays (302 pp.)—Edited by F. W. Dupee—Holt ($3.75).