Henry James's The American Scene : Its Genesis and Its Reception, 1905-1977

Abstract

Henry James's The American Scene: Its Genesis and Its Reception, 1905-1977 by Rosalie Hewitt, Northern Illinois University Henry James's The American Scene (1907) was his last book in a substantial body of travel writing which also included works on France, Italy, England, and an earlier America. However, The Amer ican Scene was unique in that it became the focal point of one of the most spirited public controversies of James's long literary career. America had never been a subject one could be neutral about, but couple that subject with a world-renowned author who seemingly had questioned the very capability of America to provide a compatible environment for the artist and the result was what one critic would call, in Jamesian tones, a "case." The publication of The American Scene capstoned a two-and-a-half-year debate, initiated by James's return to the United States in 1904, over the implications of James's expatriation. More importantly, it also offered the public, the press, and the intellectual community the opportunity to judge James's art in terms of a subject the audience itself had strong opinions about. Those who were critical of The American Scene essential Iy saw it as a negative assessment of modern America written in a densely textured style that only highlighted the aristocratic superiority of its author. Those who staunchly defended the book saw it as a probing study by a native son who could both admire and lament the diversity of a new America. Probably neither reaction was even slightly anticipated by James when he first -!nought about writing a book of "impressions." As Henry James's published letters reflect and as Leon Edel describes in his final biographical volume, The Master: 1901-1916, James's initial reasons for writing about America were somewhat contradictory, but in any case not consciously intended to create controversy. On the one hand, his motives were nostalgic and artistic, and on the other hand, practical and economic. During the years 1902-1904 while still in England, James had communicated with several people—among them his brother William, his friends Grace Norton and Louisa Loring, his fellow writer William Dean Howells—about his various reasons for revisiting America after an absence of twenty years: he had a deep yearning to see America again; his visit would be an intensely personal return to old associations; his trip would be one to take stock of his American reputation and to solidify business connections for the forthcoming collected edition of his fiction; his travels would allow him to gather new ideas to fuel an imagination going stale for lack of raw material. All of these reasons apparently led James to consider writing a book on America "for much money" to help finance the trip. Before he sailed for America on August 24, 1904, James had contracted with George Harvey of Harper and Brothers for the serialization of his American experiences and the collection of them in book form upon his return to England. Although James had written to Grace Norton that his visit to America "was to be the most private and personal act of my very private and personal life," the visit would be recorded from its very beginning in the most public of ways—he granted interviews, he posed for photographs, he lectured from coast to coast, and, of course, he published many of his journal installments in The North American Review, Harper's Magazine, and The Fortnightly Review even as he was in the very process of formulating and defining his impressions. The American tour lasted ten months, from August 1904 to July 1905, and the first installment on New England appeared In April 1905 with other instal lments on cities of the East and South appearing regularly until the last one on Richmond, Virginia, appeared in November 1906. These sixteen installments, later revised into ten chapters at his home in Rye, along with four new chapters previously unser ial Ized, came to constitute the book titled The American Scene (James had considered the title The Return of the Native but that had already been appropriated by Thomas Hardy). James had planned a second volume...