My Nation:The Transatlantic Vision of Thomas Flanagan Shaun O'Connell Henry James posed a compelling and influential statement when, in an 1872 letter to Charles Eliot Norton, he wrote, "It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuations of Europe."1 But James—feeling hemmed in while living in his family's Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, not yet thirty and eager to fly past the nets of nationality if not language and religion—did not strenuously resist the high evaluation of Europe he had formed during his recent year abroad. For James, life in Cambridge was arid, a desert, while Europe represented his lost Eden. "Very special and very interesting," he wrote, "to catch in the fact the state of being the American who has bitten deep into the apple of 'Europe' and then been obliged to take his lips from the fruit."2 He would soon return to taste Europe and pursue his art of fiction. By "Europe," James largely meant Italy, France, and England, nations where he would reside. He certainly did not mean Ireland, a land he would later visit only briefly, though his grandfather, William James, arrived in New York City from County Cavan in 1789 at age eighteen with little money and a Latin grammar. Three decades later this émigré would be a large landowner in Manhattan and in Syracuse, as well as a banker and manufacturer; his fortune financed successive generations of Jameses, but his grandson Henry did not treat this family story as an Irish-American success saga. Henry James rejected America's cultural paucity and showy wealth for Europe, rich in the fruits of history and learning, [End Page 130] a landscape of his heart's desire that reached from London, through Paris to Rome. "He had taken possession [of Europe], inhaled it, appropriated it," writes a recent critic, paraphrasing James's own words.3 Ireland lay fully beyond the pale of Henry James's imagination. That same year, reading Hawthorne's journals of his travels in France and Italy, James described the New England romancer as the quintessential American innocent abroad, unable to appreciate Europe's nuances and complexities, illustrated by Hawthorne's prudish shock at naked statuary. "We seem to see him," James wrote in his Nation review, "strolling through churches and galleries as the last pure American—attesting by his shy responses to dark canvases and cold marble his loyalty to a simpler and less encumbered civilization."4 Nathaniel Hawthorne's innocence, so tellingly American, was nothing less than willful ignorance in the eyes of Henry James, writing in the persona of a multinational, cosmopolitan flaneur. While preparing to compose his first major work, The Portrait of A Lady, James wrote a monograph for a British audience in which he again used Hawthorne as a foil to define his own sense of national identity. James famously "enumerated the items of high civilization," absent in Hawthorne's time "from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left." The list of missing cultural amenities borders on the ludicrous: "no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures" and so on. But, then, James, perhaps unwilling to wholly repudiate lingering national loyalties for his birthplace, turns the argument around. "The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say."5 Though he became an English citizen during the World War I, James would retain allegiance to the nation and city of his birth, exploring his native ground one final time in The American Scene (1904-05) and titling his collected works The New York Edition (1907-09). The unresolved tensions between his loyalty to America, despite its telling absences, and his love of Europe, despite its dark history, constituted the basis for his international novels, from The American (1877) to The Ambassadors (1903), works that portray repressed but impressionable Americans coming to full consciousness, moral and aesthetic, while visiting Europe. None of James's innocents abroad experience epiphanies of place in Ireland. [End Page...
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Jun 1, 2023
Matthew Woodcock 
Open Access