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Collected Travel Writings #1
Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America
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.
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.
868 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1993
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119 people want to read
About the author
Henry James
4,563 books3,949 followersHenry 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."
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."
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 9, 2019
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.
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.
December 3, 2014
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
October 18, 2010
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.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews