Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America

Collected Travel Writings #1

by Henry James, Richard Howard (Editor)

Collected in this Library of America volume (and its companion) for the first time, Henry James’s travel books and essays display his distinctive charm and vivacity of style, his sensuous response to the beauty of place, and his penetrating, sometimes sardonically amusing analysis of national characteristics and customs. Observant, alert, imaginative, these works remain unsurpassed guides to the countries they describe, and they form an important part of James’s extraordinary achievement in literature.

This volume brings together James’s writing on Great Britain and America. The essays of English Hours (1905) convey the freshness of James’s “wonderments and judgments and emotions” on first encountering the country that became his adopted home for half a century. He captures the immensely varied life of London in a series of walks through that “murky, modern Babylon,” which contains “the most romantic town-vistas in the world.” Lively vignettes of a winter visit to an unfashionable watering place and excursions to the cathedral towns of Wells and Salisbury are followed by a haunting evocation of the desolate Suffolk coast at Dunwich. James includes the vivid account of a New Year’s weekend at a perfectly appointed country house, midsummer dog days in London, and the spectacle of the Derby at Epsom. In every essay he enriches his portrait of the English character, governed by social conventions and yet prone to startling eccentricities. Joseph Pennell’s delightful illustrations, which appeared in the original edition, are reprinted with James’s text.

In The American Scene (1907) James revisits his native country after a twenty-year absence, traveling throughout the eastern United States from Boston to Florida. Views of the Hudson River arouse memories of his own past—the river “seemed to stretch back. . . to the earliest outlook of my consciousness,” he writes. James’s poignant rediscovery of what remained of the New York of his childhood (“the precious stretch of street between Washington Square and Fourteenth Street”) contrasts with his impression of the modern, commercial New York, a new city representing “a particular type of dauntless power. . . crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history.” Edmund Wilson, who praised The American Scene’s “magnificent solidity and brilliance,” remarked that “it was as if. . . his emotions had suddenly been given scope, his genius for expression liberated.”

Sixteen essays on traveling in England, Scotland, and America conclude this volume. The essays, most of which have never been collected, range from early pieces on London, Saratoga, and Newport, to articles on World War One that are among James’s final writings.

Genres: Travel, 19th Century, Nonfiction

846 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."

Reviews

[Brian Willis · Rating 3 out of 5]

After completing The Golden Bowl, Henry James didn't write longer fiction anymore. Other than one more attempt and few more short stories, James turned to gathering, revising, and expanding his nonfiction writing, groups of critical essays about other writers as well as writing about the places of interest he had visited and found interesting enough in the past to write about. Those pieces were published in his time and forgotten ever since until the Library of America gathered them in their collection.

This volume collects English Hours, his book on English sites of interest, and The American Scene, a series of writings that reflect his return to America in 1905 after twenty years away as an ex-patriate living in Southern England. It also collects pieces not included in those two books - "Deleted scenes" or "bonus chapters" if you will - at the end of the main pieces. For someone who knew America and Britain so well, it is a trove of recollections, reflections, and impressions, most of which transcend the time and place they are written and reflect a good deal of what is still true today.

English Hours comes with lovely sketch illustrations of the places described, which are lively and accurate but can also now be supplemented by a Google images search, and/or your own recollections and personal photos. The contents are essays on "London" (natch), "(Browning in) Westminster Abbey", "Chester", "Lichfield and Warwick", "North Devon", "Wells and Salisbury", "An English Easter", and "London at Midsummer" (both describing the curious sensation of England idle on holidays which I experienced living there), "Two Excursions" (The Epsom Derby and Oxford), "In Warwickshire" (the area and Stratford-upon-Avon), "Abbeys and Castles, "English Vignettes", "An English New Year", "An English Winter Watering-Place" (seaside at the dead time of winter), "Winchelsea, Rye and 'Denis Duval'", and "Old Suffolk". The titles tell you what you are getting, and James vividly explains the charm of the English countryside and customs and the warmth and friendliness of the English people. In addition to the titles, he describes what it is like (and I can attest to much of their accuracy and evocation) to explore St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster and the Abbey, Warwick Castle, Lichfield, Shrewsbury, Exeter Cathedral, Glastonbury Abbey, Salisbury Cathedral, Stonehenge, Baker Street, St. James's Park, Rochester, Canterbury Cathedral, Richmond and Greenwich, Oxford, Kenilworth, Ludlow, Portsmouth, Cambridge, Bury St. Edmunds, Brighton, Rye, Winchelsea, Suffolk, and both factory and country towns. The supplementary uncollected writings expand on London sights, the annual Oxford vs Cambridge boat race, London suburbs, London quiet and dead in winter, Scotland, and England at WWI time.

The American Scene is James's book of American reconnection. After his expatriation, he finally returned for a lengthy visit and tour in 1905. He details what he found in New England, New York state and City, Newport, Boston, Concord and Salem, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond Virginia, Charleston, and Florida. The volume ends with earlier uncollected writings on upper New York state, Saratoga, Newport, Quebec, Niagara, and Americans travelling abroad. All in all, the LoA volume collects all of his Anglophile travel observations in one place. Being a man of dual citizenship and residency, they are valuable descriptions and comparisons of the cultures an customs of both our peoples.

It's very worth a read and very observant. James is incredibly insightful, especially as an expatriate on the world of Britain and its observance, construction, and customs. As an American who lived there for five years, I found myself nodding in agreement and recognizing many of the insights he shared from the places he visited. Some of the same is true of The American Scene. I found myself reviewing the visited sights with my mind's eye and feeling anew the same sensations that he describes. The places I haven't been, I "visited" as closest I could with my imagination and the help of illustrations and Google Images.

Ultimately, I dropped this from a four to a three, because The American Scene is written in James's infamous "late style", the incredibly obtuse and overelaborate obfuscation of prose that might work to untangle the complication of human thought in the form of a novel but rather tended to blur the focus of the image of place he was trying to describe in travel writing. Henry, describe the places first for those of us who haven't been there. THEN you can get to the core of its appeal. It worked better with the fiction, but muddles the matter with travel writing, which should be descriptive and evocative, not professorial and occluding.

Nonetheless, I recommend at least parts of these essays for those who have visited the places described - or want to - with the above caveat. Experience of late Henry James helps with TAS, and some experience of HJ in general for EH. Good travel guides for those that want to relive to taste those places even today when we are still an ocean apart. I am however very glad to have spent my time "travelling" with James to these places again in my mind.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Please see my reviews for _English Hours_ and _The American Scene_, the two full length works included in this volume.

The uncollected essays are minor, trivial pieces and most are not worth commenting upon. However, of interest in the British section are the very late pieces (among the last written works James produced) advocating American entry into World War I (and as you can see these can't really be categorized as "travel writing"), which gives some interesting insight into his thoughts about "the Great War" and how it affected refugees from Europe resettled in England. In the American section of the book, the essay on "Quebec" is the liveliest and freshest and contains very good descriptions and observations on what James regarded as a little French province in the heart of a land mostly "British." Also of interest (and again not really a "travel writing") is the final essay on "Americans Abroad" from 1878, which is a sort of sociological inquiry into how Americans are perceived and how they act in Europe.

[Dr. Carl Ludwig Dorsch · Rating 1 out of 5]

In a piece itself titled The American Scene published in his collection The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden says of James’s The American Scene: “Indeed, perhaps the best way to approach this book is as a prose poem of the first order… It is not even necessary to start at the beginning or read with continuity; one can open it at almost any page.”

I have followed Auden’s advice, even expanding it to include the other travel writings included in Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America, and have found James’s text, opening the volume to almost any page, generally close to unreadable: prolix high self-consciousness wrapped (apparently) in high self-regard. I have thought that perhaps it might be saved by reading it aloud in a funny voice, but have not yet attempted the test.

On pages 604 through 606 in the present collection, in one paragraph of almost two pages’ length, James compares his voyage by train from Jersey City toward Charleston, South Carolina, through a surprising spring snow cover, to the general lack of American “discrimination”, to the American propensity to simplify everything:

“Practically, till I reached Charleston, this way [the snowy monotony of the landscape, I think], disclaiming every invidious intent, refused to be dissociated from anything else in the world: it was only another case of the painting with a big brush, a brush steeped in crude universal white, and of the colossal size this implement was capable of assuming. Gradations, transitions, differences of any sort, temporal, material, social, whether in man or in his environment, shrank somehow, under its sweep, to negligible terms; and one had perhaps never yet seemed so to move through a vast simplified scheme. The illustration was once more, in fine, of the small inherent, the small accumulated resistance, in American air, to any force that does simplify. One found the signs of such resistance as little in the prospect enjoyed from the car-window as one distinguished them in the vain images if the interior; those human documents, deciphered from one’s seat in the Pullman, which yet do always, in their way, for the traveler, constitute precious evidence. The spread of this single great wash of winter from latitude to latitude struck me in fact as having its analogy in the vast vogue of some infinitely-selling novel, one of those happy volumes of which the circulation roars, periodically, from Atlantic to Pacific and from great windy State to State, in the manner, as I have heard it vividly put, of a blazing prairie fire; with as little possibility of arrest from “criticism” in the one case as from the bleating of lost sheep in the other. Everything, so to speak, was monotonized, and the whole social order might have had its nose, for the time, buried, by one leveling doom, in pages that, after the break of the spell, it would never know itself to mention again.”

Pardon the lengthy and, to my ear (still lacking the funny voice enunciating it, it at least) ludicrously convoluted excerpt, which is, remarkably, only a portion of the original passage. That the snowy monotony of the landscape (not to mention the view of the compartment interior or its inhabitants) might suggest an analogy to a superficial American monoculture is, to my mind, the sort of passing thought which, on reflection, would hardly bear the weight of further exposition. A bit superficial itself, I’d be tempted to think. But to carry on at that length and manner? Cartoon like.

Poetry? This patch only in some perversely satiric way, I’d venture.



morning snow:
onion shoots rising
mark the garden plot

Bashō

[Juan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually, I've only read some selected excerpts from Great Britain/The English Hours under the title "London by Henry James". A great choice, anyway, to know more about the maiden by the Thames in the late 19th century.