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The American Scene
The American Scene is a book of travel writing by Henry James about his trip through the United States in 1904-1905. Ten of the fourteen chapters of the book were published in the North American Review, Harper's and the Fortnightly Review in 1905 and 1906. The first book publication was in 1907, and there were significant differences between the American and the English versions of the book. Without question the most controversial and critically discussed of James' travel books, The American Scene sharply attacked what James saw as the rampant materialism and frayed social structure of turn-of-the-century America. The book has generated controversy for its treatment of various ethnic groups and political issues. The book still has relevance to such current topics as immigration policy, environmental protection, economic growth, and racial tensions. -- from Wikipedia
Excerpt:
The following pages duly explain themselves, I judge, as to the Author's point of view and his relation to his subject; but I prefix this word on the chance of any suspected or perceived failure of such references. My visit to America had been the first possible to me for nearly a quarter of a century, and I had before my last previous one, brief and distant to memory, spent other years in continuous absence; so that I was to return with much of the freshness of eye, outward and inward, which, with the further contribution of a state of desire, is commonly held a precious agent of perception. I felt no doubt, I confess, of my great advantage on that score; since if I had had time to become almost as "fresh" as an inquiring stranger, I had not on the other hand had enough to cease to be, or at least to feel, as acute as an initiated native. I made no scruple of my conviction that I should understand and should care better and more than the most earnest of visitors, and yet that I should vibrate with more curiosity - on the extent of ground, that is, on which I might aspire to intimate intelligence at all - than the pilgrim with the longest list of questions, the sharpest appetite for explanations and the largest exposure to mistakes.
I felt myself then, all serenely, not exposed to grave mistakes - though there were also doubtless explanations which would find me, and quite as contentedly, impenetrable.
Excerpt:
The following pages duly explain themselves, I judge, as to the Author's point of view and his relation to his subject; but I prefix this word on the chance of any suspected or perceived failure of such references. My visit to America had been the first possible to me for nearly a quarter of a century, and I had before my last previous one, brief and distant to memory, spent other years in continuous absence; so that I was to return with much of the freshness of eye, outward and inward, which, with the further contribution of a state of desire, is commonly held a precious agent of perception. I felt no doubt, I confess, of my great advantage on that score; since if I had had time to become almost as "fresh" as an inquiring stranger, I had not on the other hand had enough to cease to be, or at least to feel, as acute as an initiated native. I made no scruple of my conviction that I should understand and should care better and more than the most earnest of visitors, and yet that I should vibrate with more curiosity - on the extent of ground, that is, on which I might aspire to intimate intelligence at all - than the pilgrim with the longest list of questions, the sharpest appetite for explanations and the largest exposure to mistakes.
I felt myself then, all serenely, not exposed to grave mistakes - though there were also doubtless explanations which would find me, and quite as contentedly, impenetrable.
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1907
39 people are currently reading
368 people want to read
About the author
Henry James
4,643 books3,966 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 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 14, 2013
The candid reader, in confronting this narrative of temporary repatriation, and no less militant an attitude than confrontation will survive the persistently convoluted syntax of the book with wits intact, will find, apart from an often over-precious and even infantilizing tendency towards anthropomorphization, as if the book itself claims the same privilege of inanimate speech for its brethren that it alone truly enjoys, a wealth of jaundiced insight into the state of early 20th century America, delivered with such a euphemizing tone that that candid reader, if inattentive, might mistake this jeremiad for a harmless travelogue.
All in all, James seems happy that he left, although I can't think it healthy for him or for America.
All in all, James seems happy that he left, although I can't think it healthy for him or for America.
January 6, 2015
I recall James in the Bowery as my favorite passage in all the H James I have read, and his account of touring the Berkshires in a car with Edith Wharton--or was that her account? Maybe. it's been nearly half a century since I've read either.
January 23, 2026
It does not take long to understand that Henry James did not like modernity. Who knows whether it upset his sensibilities or scared him. Whether it was skyscrapers, crowds, immigrants, foreign accents, Black people walking openly in the streets, the visible signs of careful dentistry, the changes James saw in America disturbed him. It takes Mr. James a long time to satisfy himself that he is making his point clear. There are many repetitions, each subtly different yet repetitive nonetheless, and many lengthy sentences and paragraphs displaying his skill with words and his absence of style as a travel writer. If only he had read someone such as Isabella L. Bird before he began.
Elements of his personality and his opinions show themselves. His love of never quite saying enough to satisfy himself makes the reading a somewhat daunting task. His fond memories of a simpler time when a rural life was only a brisk walk beyond the city limits and the noise and bustle fell away. On the darker side are his antisemitism, often of the crudest kind:
There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got a start, and the scene here [in New York] bristled, at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds.
and his racism. While James makes clear he thought slavery had been abhorrent, he cannot treat Black people as equals. They are fine in their place but should not go further without offending him:
I was waiting, in a cab, at the railway-station, for the delivery of my luggage after my arrival, while a group of tatterdemalion darkies lounged and sunned themselves within range. To take in with any attention two or three of these figures had surely been to feel one's self introduced at a bound to the formidable question, which rose suddenly like some beast that had sprung from the jungle. These were its far outposts; they represented the Southern black as we knew him not, and had not within the memory of man known him, at the North; and to see him there, ragged and rudimentary, yet all portentous and "in possession of his rights as a man," was to be not a little discomposed, was to be in fact very much admonished.
It is not an easy read to wade through James' verbosity and what traveller's anecdotes there are struggle to have much effect. A few stand out, such as his visit to the Bowery Theater in New York and his remarks on the growing prevalence of certain dental practices:
I remember to have heard it remarked by a French friend, of a young woman who had returned to her native land after some years of domestic service in America, that she had acquired there, with other advantages, le sourire Californien, and the "Californian" smile, indeed, expressed, more or less copiously, in undissimulated cubes of the precious metal, plays between lips that render scant other tribute to civilization.
It is just about worth the effort to reach the end and feel disappointed that he did not include his views on Californian life.
Elements of his personality and his opinions show themselves. His love of never quite saying enough to satisfy himself makes the reading a somewhat daunting task. His fond memories of a simpler time when a rural life was only a brisk walk beyond the city limits and the noise and bustle fell away. On the darker side are his antisemitism, often of the crudest kind:
There is no swarming like that of Israel when once Israel has got a start, and the scene here [in New York] bristled, at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds.
and his racism. While James makes clear he thought slavery had been abhorrent, he cannot treat Black people as equals. They are fine in their place but should not go further without offending him:
I was waiting, in a cab, at the railway-station, for the delivery of my luggage after my arrival, while a group of tatterdemalion darkies lounged and sunned themselves within range. To take in with any attention two or three of these figures had surely been to feel one's self introduced at a bound to the formidable question, which rose suddenly like some beast that had sprung from the jungle. These were its far outposts; they represented the Southern black as we knew him not, and had not within the memory of man known him, at the North; and to see him there, ragged and rudimentary, yet all portentous and "in possession of his rights as a man," was to be not a little discomposed, was to be in fact very much admonished.
It is not an easy read to wade through James' verbosity and what traveller's anecdotes there are struggle to have much effect. A few stand out, such as his visit to the Bowery Theater in New York and his remarks on the growing prevalence of certain dental practices:
I remember to have heard it remarked by a French friend, of a young woman who had returned to her native land after some years of domestic service in America, that she had acquired there, with other advantages, le sourire Californien, and the "Californian" smile, indeed, expressed, more or less copiously, in undissimulated cubes of the precious metal, plays between lips that render scant other tribute to civilization.
It is just about worth the effort to reach the end and feel disappointed that he did not include his views on Californian life.
February 2, 2010
In this highly fraught, anxiety-ridden volume, Henry James, lifelong expatriate long before Hemingway and others made it fashionable, returns to his native America and turns his prodigious gifts as a travel writer upon the land that he chose to leave. James' always elaborately constructed sentences gain an edge of the neurotic here, but while with other writers (Salman Rushdie?) that might prove irritating, with the cool, detached James it is quite welcome. The unsteadiness serves to lend James' scincillating gifts of description a weight and depth they often lack and the whole volume reads as unerringly fascinating.
February 3, 2024
My score oscilatted between giving this 3 or 4 stars as I was reading this. Mixed thoughts on this one. On one day, I thought '4 stars - spectacular writing', the next day 'oh, didn't like that too much, 3' etc.
Although I had been mostly underwhelmed by the works of Mr. Henry James to date, I kept feeling that there is a Jamesian gem out there somewhere, just waiting for me to be discovered. (I felt this way about Faulkner's work, an instinct which turned out to be correct). The two main reasons I chose this particular book were 1) because Eliot and Pound BOTH raved about this work by James in their essays; and 2) because it consists of his travel writings upon return to the United States, and therefore wanted to see what his non-fiction was like.
Another reason I wanted to read his travel writings is because I have failed to feel any feelings remotely approaching sympathy or empathy when it comes to the aristocratic snobs and boors who populate James' novels. They suffer from 'rich people's problems', let's face it. So boo-frickin-hoo.
Therefore, I thought that this book would be enjoyable as such loathsome characters would be refreshingly absent.
That much was true. However, what did disappoint me, as some other reviewers have pointed out, is the condescending aristocratic snobbishness that pervades much of the writing. The feeling of 'yeah, I'm writing this from a comfortable armchair and smoking a good pipe while I couldn't care less about the suffering poor' (whom James does not even consider even a PART of so-called "society", a shocking confirmation that came in the latter part of this book), was extremely irritating. Almost equally irritating is the tortured and tortuous highly-convoluted style that is Henry James. Many people consider this 'good writing'. When you have to go back and re-read a sentence three times (and some of his sentences are exceedingly long) in order to figure out what the bloody hell he is pipin' on about, then no, I do not consider that 'good writing', or at the very least, it has slipped under the radars of an editor who must be at least half-awake to the assumed reading audience. To go to the other extreme, I do not find something excessively simple, such as Hemingway's style, necessarily 'good writing' either. It can be, but is not always. Really good writing lies somewhere in between. It has to be startling, alive, but ultimately coherent. Another big issue many people will have with this book is the very thinly-veiled note of Anti-Semitism and racism that crop up here and there.
Having said that, there were fantastic moments to this book. Reading James' prose is a bit like wading through a thick, soupy swamp. At some point you look down past your wellies to see something sparkling in the mud down there. A true gem. You pause and reflect upon its beauty. Then it's back to the swamp. To extrapolate by employing an almost equally corny metaphor (my apologies - blame James), reading him is a bit like trudging through a thick jungle (like one of the Floridian jungles he describes in the final chapter, therefore an apt but corny reference), with a nice recently sharpened machete (AKA your reading eyes), only to descry in the distance a clearing. You come out into the clearing and there are all sorts of wonders there you had never hoped to find. Then you plunge into the jungle once again, as you begrudgingly push on towards your destination (the end of the book).
On almost any given page, you encounter a beautiful spectacularly designed sentence that radiates with intelligence if not brilliance. These are the moment when I genuinely like James' writing. The problem is they are FAR too much few and far between. I wanted to like this book, and at certain moments I did thoroughly enjoy it. The chapters on Richmond (his reflections upon the Civil War and its devastation), the chapter on Boston and the closing one on Florida were quite enjoyable to read, despite the occasional thicket of forest one is forced to trudge through.
What I hope someone does one day is compile all of James' most beautiful sentences into one volume - now THAT would be something worth reading. The only other main reason I would recommend James' books is that they are real tests of your ability to concentrate. Not only are the sentences convoluted and long, but there is a certain Jamesian logic which I'm still trying to figure out.
Along with The Bostonians, this is probably my favourite work by James so far. It did have its moments BUT one must remind oneself that reading, including pleasure reading, is ultimately another form of investment, of one's time. Is it worth investing one's time in this book? Ultimately, my own answer is 'yes' for both good and bad reasons. It has given me some ideas on how to write, and equally importantly, it has shown me also how NOT to write because all things considered, the main conclusion I drew from reading James so far is that his style of writing has NOT survived very well into the 21st Century. The writings of other American writers of the past, such as Melville, Thoreau and Emerson (just to name a few) HAVE fared much better, which is a testament to something inherently great about each and every one of them, in their own great and idiosyncratic ways.
'Nuff said. Tip of a half glass in James' direction. In the meantime, the search continues for that hidden Jamesian gem.
Although I had been mostly underwhelmed by the works of Mr. Henry James to date, I kept feeling that there is a Jamesian gem out there somewhere, just waiting for me to be discovered. (I felt this way about Faulkner's work, an instinct which turned out to be correct). The two main reasons I chose this particular book were 1) because Eliot and Pound BOTH raved about this work by James in their essays; and 2) because it consists of his travel writings upon return to the United States, and therefore wanted to see what his non-fiction was like.
Another reason I wanted to read his travel writings is because I have failed to feel any feelings remotely approaching sympathy or empathy when it comes to the aristocratic snobs and boors who populate James' novels. They suffer from 'rich people's problems', let's face it. So boo-frickin-hoo.
Therefore, I thought that this book would be enjoyable as such loathsome characters would be refreshingly absent.
That much was true. However, what did disappoint me, as some other reviewers have pointed out, is the condescending aristocratic snobbishness that pervades much of the writing. The feeling of 'yeah, I'm writing this from a comfortable armchair and smoking a good pipe while I couldn't care less about the suffering poor' (whom James does not even consider even a PART of so-called "society", a shocking confirmation that came in the latter part of this book), was extremely irritating. Almost equally irritating is the tortured and tortuous highly-convoluted style that is Henry James. Many people consider this 'good writing'. When you have to go back and re-read a sentence three times (and some of his sentences are exceedingly long) in order to figure out what the bloody hell he is pipin' on about, then no, I do not consider that 'good writing', or at the very least, it has slipped under the radars of an editor who must be at least half-awake to the assumed reading audience. To go to the other extreme, I do not find something excessively simple, such as Hemingway's style, necessarily 'good writing' either. It can be, but is not always. Really good writing lies somewhere in between. It has to be startling, alive, but ultimately coherent. Another big issue many people will have with this book is the very thinly-veiled note of Anti-Semitism and racism that crop up here and there.
Having said that, there were fantastic moments to this book. Reading James' prose is a bit like wading through a thick, soupy swamp. At some point you look down past your wellies to see something sparkling in the mud down there. A true gem. You pause and reflect upon its beauty. Then it's back to the swamp. To extrapolate by employing an almost equally corny metaphor (my apologies - blame James), reading him is a bit like trudging through a thick jungle (like one of the Floridian jungles he describes in the final chapter, therefore an apt but corny reference), with a nice recently sharpened machete (AKA your reading eyes), only to descry in the distance a clearing. You come out into the clearing and there are all sorts of wonders there you had never hoped to find. Then you plunge into the jungle once again, as you begrudgingly push on towards your destination (the end of the book).
On almost any given page, you encounter a beautiful spectacularly designed sentence that radiates with intelligence if not brilliance. These are the moment when I genuinely like James' writing. The problem is they are FAR too much few and far between. I wanted to like this book, and at certain moments I did thoroughly enjoy it. The chapters on Richmond (his reflections upon the Civil War and its devastation), the chapter on Boston and the closing one on Florida were quite enjoyable to read, despite the occasional thicket of forest one is forced to trudge through.
What I hope someone does one day is compile all of James' most beautiful sentences into one volume - now THAT would be something worth reading. The only other main reason I would recommend James' books is that they are real tests of your ability to concentrate. Not only are the sentences convoluted and long, but there is a certain Jamesian logic which I'm still trying to figure out.
Along with The Bostonians, this is probably my favourite work by James so far. It did have its moments BUT one must remind oneself that reading, including pleasure reading, is ultimately another form of investment, of one's time. Is it worth investing one's time in this book? Ultimately, my own answer is 'yes' for both good and bad reasons. It has given me some ideas on how to write, and equally importantly, it has shown me also how NOT to write because all things considered, the main conclusion I drew from reading James so far is that his style of writing has NOT survived very well into the 21st Century. The writings of other American writers of the past, such as Melville, Thoreau and Emerson (just to name a few) HAVE fared much better, which is a testament to something inherently great about each and every one of them, in their own great and idiosyncratic ways.
'Nuff said. Tip of a half glass in James' direction. In the meantime, the search continues for that hidden Jamesian gem.
Read
December 3, 2008Watch James beat off hordes of seemingly uncontrollable "impressions" that assault the fine silken threads of his consciousness, like crowds wedging themselves onto a tram. Watch James freak over the democratic implications of proto-modernist windows. It’s all very well to ‘criticize,’ but you distinctly take an interest and are the victim of your interest.
perhaps-i-will-read-hard-to-say
August 13, 2019Why are people shelving this as "fiction?" Groan.
December 23, 2019
I can’t decide if I’m more put off by James’ pretentious late style or his condescension to other classes and ethnicities.
May 12, 2020
I have been greatly irritated by this book. James' main complaint about the United States is...it isn't Europe. Of course it isn't! And it couldn't be even if it tried! There are a thousand complaints about details that--while important to James--probably wouldn't be important to most cultivated travelers. And then there is the prose. Much of it is plainly unreadable. We need an English translation. There is simply no need for such long, convoluted sentences which go nowhere at all. And it would be nice if James used English words in the sense in which most people taken them, not inventing a new language of his own. After reading this I am glad I never met the man.
December 15, 2021
I don't know how many times I've read and studied this, and it never gets old.
July 4, 2019
A helpful travelogue. I focused on the visit to Florida, Palm Beach and St. Augustine. James is very unimpressed. In a thousand words, he seems to find the reputations exaggerated.
December 15, 2025
My slightly expanded review of Peter Brooks's Henry James Comes Home -
https://ocreviewofbooks.org/2025/06/1...
- can serve here.
In Henry James Comes Home Peter Brooks recreates James’s North American tour of 1904-5 and looks into what James “made of what his nation was on its way to becoming.” The American Scene (1907) is what James made of his journey, and in elucidating that singular work - Auden called it “a prose poem of the first order” - Brooks has made a welcome addition to a subgenre one might call the “biographies of books”: critical studies with a narrative sense, lively accounts of how a particular work came to be written. Like Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary and Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel, Henry James Comes Home tells the story of a style and describes the context of creation; like Betz’s Rilke in Paris and Kennan’s Marquis de Custine and His "Russia in 1839", it charts a journey, clarifies an itinerary, and identifies the encounters in which a writer’s later reflections are rooted.
In 1903, after nearly three decades in Europe, where he had gone as a “yearning young American,” James felt time had come to return to “the native, the forsaken scene, now passing…through a thousand stages and changes, and offering an iridescence of fresh prospects.” Brother William’s warning of the “physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you” failed to daunt the artist (as opposed to the mere aesthete) into “giving up, chucking away” his chance to treat the experience of return, to convert it, “through observation, imagination and reflection now at their maturity,” into “vivid and solid material, into a general renovation of one’s too monotonized grab-bag.” Whatever “primitive” “hates” and “aversions” his rediscovered country might inspire will “lose themselves in the act of contemplation, or at any rate in the act of reproduction.” To William Dean Howells he flatly declared, “I am hungry for Material.”
James landed at Hoboken on August 30, 1904. After a brief stay with the president of Harper and Brothers at his Jersey shore summer home, where Mark Twain was coincidentally also a guest, he proceeded to William’s retreat in New Hampshire, for an “arcadian” late summer sojourn in which “great straight pines” encircled little lakes to make “the sacred grove and the American classic temple, the temple for the worship of the evening sky” (what a lovely image!). Then to Salem, Concord, Cape Cod; Newport, and the lordly Hudson; motoring with Wharton, Boston ambulations, contemplation of Harvard, and an evening among the graves of his parents and of Alice, “with a wintry pink light in the west, the special shade, fading to a heartless prettiness of grey, that shows with a polar chill through the grim tracery of November.”
In the “darkened gorges of masonry” of the “huge jagged city,” James sought traces of his old New York; he found Trinity Church and others “cruelly overtopped” in the working of “that inexorable law of the growing invisibility of churches.” He also studied “the conversion of the alien”: “ingurgitation” at Ellis Island - “settled possession” of certain neighborhoods - “promotion” evinced by the straight teeth and the good shoes of the children. Though his younger brothers had been officers in the 54th Massachusetts, James showed no comparable interest in how African-Americans were faring, I think because he saw them as permanent aliens, unassimilable and fit only to serve. He whimpered over
He pitied the southern gentry as “the people in the world the worst ministered to” and added that he could have “shed tears” when “reflecting that it was for this they had fought and fallen.” A “group of tatterdemalion darkies” at a rail station in Virginia prompted him to advise Northerners that, when considering the “formidable question, which [rises] suddenly like some beast that had sprung from the jungle,” they should remember that “the Southern black” is so repulsive, so “ragged and rudimentary,” as to “disabuse a tactful mind of the urgency of preaching, southward, a sweet reasonableness about him.” (Of course, they appear “ragged and rudimentary” because their nation was designed, by law and by violent custom, to make and to keep them that way - but this truth has, historically, passed over the heads of most white people.) More contemptuous of native-born blacks than of European immigrants, James presents the reversed image of General Sherman, who announced, in an 1888 essay published in the North American Review (where seven installments of The American Scene would appear in 1905-6), that he had at last come round to black male suffrage. After all, he wrote, they are Americans, and so more familiar than the “Bohemians who reach Castle Garden by thousands every day of the year.” To further complicate this picture of WASP racism, I’ll add that Sherman would have found James’s sensitivity to the plight of Indians mawkish and soft-hearted.
In Philadelphia James found New York’s opposite, a society consanguineous and calm. Washington, too, offered a contrast, a “City of Conversation” (especially so to a guest of Henry Adams) where, socially, the business man wasn’t the sole category of male. “It took no greater intensity of the South than Baltimore could easily give” for him to feel “the huge shadow of the War,” though in Richmond he at first felt nothing - the drab, sour, Northern-looking city was not “grandly sad,” lacked “a nobleness of ruin,” and did not match his “lurid, fuliginous, vividly tragic” idea of it; but the artist was there to admonish the aesthete, and James discovered that an aborted capital is naturally drab and sour, and quite interesting for that. By Charleston he was reconciled to straining to see historic romance, and he accepted Florida as a primeval blank, “a Nile, in short, without the least little implication of a Sphinx,” still less of a Cleopatra.
Beneath the aesthete who deplored ugliness, beneath the artist who lamented the lack of associational “thickness” needed for his practice of fiction, there sat, animating both, a patriot of sorts, one brooding over the consequences of careless greed and plutocratic nihilism. For James aesthetic impressionability and novelistic analysis were tools to detect and describe the forces he thought menaced “continuity, responsibility, transmission.” James’s method of detection and description, Brooks writes, was to “latch on to an apparently telling detail” and elaborate “an idea that, under the pressure of his imagination and the work of his prose, develops into a kind of imagistic anthropological vision.”
The American Scene has a “figural” texture - James’s “language of analysis, eschewing the statistical and the journalistic, found its greatest truth in a continuously analogical and metaphorical discourse.” In James’s “metaphoricity” aspects of the landscape frequently figure as foundling children - abandoned, “unaffiliated,” “unchristened.” And James’s advocacy of architectural preservation, dignified urbanity, and the maintenance of public art and amenity carries a stern warning: a society that builds things so oppressive no one becomes attached to them, and demolishes everything before it can begin to get old, will never be anything but “expensively provisional,” and barely habitable. The American Scene has plenty to make one wince, but enough of its writing is beautiful, enough of its analysis usable; and Brooks is to be thanked for bringing this complicated book closer to our eyes.
https://ocreviewofbooks.org/2025/06/1...
- can serve here.
In Henry James Comes Home Peter Brooks recreates James’s North American tour of 1904-5 and looks into what James “made of what his nation was on its way to becoming.” The American Scene (1907) is what James made of his journey, and in elucidating that singular work - Auden called it “a prose poem of the first order” - Brooks has made a welcome addition to a subgenre one might call the “biographies of books”: critical studies with a narrative sense, lively accounts of how a particular work came to be written. Like Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary and Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel, Henry James Comes Home tells the story of a style and describes the context of creation; like Betz’s Rilke in Paris and Kennan’s Marquis de Custine and His "Russia in 1839", it charts a journey, clarifies an itinerary, and identifies the encounters in which a writer’s later reflections are rooted.
In 1903, after nearly three decades in Europe, where he had gone as a “yearning young American,” James felt time had come to return to “the native, the forsaken scene, now passing…through a thousand stages and changes, and offering an iridescence of fresh prospects.” Brother William’s warning of the “physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you” failed to daunt the artist (as opposed to the mere aesthete) into “giving up, chucking away” his chance to treat the experience of return, to convert it, “through observation, imagination and reflection now at their maturity,” into “vivid and solid material, into a general renovation of one’s too monotonized grab-bag.” Whatever “primitive” “hates” and “aversions” his rediscovered country might inspire will “lose themselves in the act of contemplation, or at any rate in the act of reproduction.” To William Dean Howells he flatly declared, “I am hungry for Material.”
James landed at Hoboken on August 30, 1904. After a brief stay with the president of Harper and Brothers at his Jersey shore summer home, where Mark Twain was coincidentally also a guest, he proceeded to William’s retreat in New Hampshire, for an “arcadian” late summer sojourn in which “great straight pines” encircled little lakes to make “the sacred grove and the American classic temple, the temple for the worship of the evening sky” (what a lovely image!). Then to Salem, Concord, Cape Cod; Newport, and the lordly Hudson; motoring with Wharton, Boston ambulations, contemplation of Harvard, and an evening among the graves of his parents and of Alice, “with a wintry pink light in the west, the special shade, fading to a heartless prettiness of grey, that shows with a polar chill through the grim tracery of November.”
In the “darkened gorges of masonry” of the “huge jagged city,” James sought traces of his old New York; he found Trinity Church and others “cruelly overtopped” in the working of “that inexorable law of the growing invisibility of churches.” He also studied “the conversion of the alien”: “ingurgitation” at Ellis Island - “settled possession” of certain neighborhoods - “promotion” evinced by the straight teeth and the good shoes of the children. Though his younger brothers had been officers in the 54th Massachusetts, James showed no comparable interest in how African-Americans were faring, I think because he saw them as permanent aliens, unassimilable and fit only to serve. He whimpered over
the apparently deep-seated inaptitude of the negro race at large for any alertness of personal service, having been throughout a lively surprise. One had counted, with some eagerness, in moving southward, on the virtual opposite - on finding this deficiency, encountered right and left at the North, beautifully corrected; one had remembered the old Southern tradition, the house alive with the scramble of young darkies for the honour of fetching and carrying…
He pitied the southern gentry as “the people in the world the worst ministered to” and added that he could have “shed tears” when “reflecting that it was for this they had fought and fallen.” A “group of tatterdemalion darkies” at a rail station in Virginia prompted him to advise Northerners that, when considering the “formidable question, which [rises] suddenly like some beast that had sprung from the jungle,” they should remember that “the Southern black” is so repulsive, so “ragged and rudimentary,” as to “disabuse a tactful mind of the urgency of preaching, southward, a sweet reasonableness about him.” (Of course, they appear “ragged and rudimentary” because their nation was designed, by law and by violent custom, to make and to keep them that way - but this truth has, historically, passed over the heads of most white people.) More contemptuous of native-born blacks than of European immigrants, James presents the reversed image of General Sherman, who announced, in an 1888 essay published in the North American Review (where seven installments of The American Scene would appear in 1905-6), that he had at last come round to black male suffrage. After all, he wrote, they are Americans, and so more familiar than the “Bohemians who reach Castle Garden by thousands every day of the year.” To further complicate this picture of WASP racism, I’ll add that Sherman would have found James’s sensitivity to the plight of Indians mawkish and soft-hearted.
In Philadelphia James found New York’s opposite, a society consanguineous and calm. Washington, too, offered a contrast, a “City of Conversation” (especially so to a guest of Henry Adams) where, socially, the business man wasn’t the sole category of male. “It took no greater intensity of the South than Baltimore could easily give” for him to feel “the huge shadow of the War,” though in Richmond he at first felt nothing - the drab, sour, Northern-looking city was not “grandly sad,” lacked “a nobleness of ruin,” and did not match his “lurid, fuliginous, vividly tragic” idea of it; but the artist was there to admonish the aesthete, and James discovered that an aborted capital is naturally drab and sour, and quite interesting for that. By Charleston he was reconciled to straining to see historic romance, and he accepted Florida as a primeval blank, “a Nile, in short, without the least little implication of a Sphinx,” still less of a Cleopatra.
Beneath the aesthete who deplored ugliness, beneath the artist who lamented the lack of associational “thickness” needed for his practice of fiction, there sat, animating both, a patriot of sorts, one brooding over the consequences of careless greed and plutocratic nihilism. For James aesthetic impressionability and novelistic analysis were tools to detect and describe the forces he thought menaced “continuity, responsibility, transmission.” James’s method of detection and description, Brooks writes, was to “latch on to an apparently telling detail” and elaborate “an idea that, under the pressure of his imagination and the work of his prose, develops into a kind of imagistic anthropological vision.”
The American Scene has a “figural” texture - James’s “language of analysis, eschewing the statistical and the journalistic, found its greatest truth in a continuously analogical and metaphorical discourse.” In James’s “metaphoricity” aspects of the landscape frequently figure as foundling children - abandoned, “unaffiliated,” “unchristened.” And James’s advocacy of architectural preservation, dignified urbanity, and the maintenance of public art and amenity carries a stern warning: a society that builds things so oppressive no one becomes attached to them, and demolishes everything before it can begin to get old, will never be anything but “expensively provisional,” and barely habitable. The American Scene has plenty to make one wince, but enough of its writing is beautiful, enough of its analysis usable; and Brooks is to be thanked for bringing this complicated book closer to our eyes.
February 9, 2019
Unlike most of his other travel writing, James planned and composed this collection to be read as a single piece, a commentary on the places and people he had strong associations with from his youth: mainly the urban northeast coast of the United States. He wrote the book after his return visit to America 25 years after his emigration to Europe. While there are some interesting images (he views New York City, with it's skyline of skyscrapers as a "pincushion" for example), this is a seriously flawed work on two counts: the prose itself, which is typical late-Jamesian writing, and the deeply reactionary observations and conclusions he draws about "the American scene" c. 1905. While the prose style James developed in his late novels and stories works admirably well (and is incredibly wonderful and challenging to read) for his social observations refracted through a fictional lens, it is merely tedious, over-lengthy, and difficult to follow in his nonfiction (there is no narrative thread to follow and this may make the work less than it should be). His lengthy Balzacian paragraphs (not at all structured and seemingly arbitrarily composed) made me frustrated while reading and quite willing to put the book aside in order to gain some rest for my eyes. This is not something that is entertaining to read, nor do I consider it artfully done. As to my second problem with this work, I believe his somewhat ridiculous attitude towards (what he would have considered) non-white populations in New England, the newfangled architecture, the sheer amount of _change_ he finds in the areas he visits as compared to his memories, is because he chose only to consider for this book areas with which he had a long-standing relationship since his youth (with the exception of some of his southern travels that I'll get to in a moment). At times (too frequently) he is openly racist and somewhat passive-aggressively hostile to the non-English residents that he encounters, and this racism (which includes his observations of "darkies" in the South) is probably the single most unfortunate part of this very long book. Frankly, even though this attitude was a common one in American culture at the turn of the 20th century, I just expect a little more thoughtfulness and engagement with change from someone whose fiction is as subtle and thought-provoking as James's is.
The one redeeming chapter of the book is the final one on Florida (even though it also exhibits all of the features I object to above). In this chapter he is clearly excited by the wildness of the landscape, scathing in the rich tourist culture he found in Palm Beach, and has very interesting and original observations to make about the direction of American capitalism and expansionism. My advice: borrow a copy (don't buy it) an read the final chapter. You don't really need to look into the rest of the book.
The one redeeming chapter of the book is the final one on Florida (even though it also exhibits all of the features I object to above). In this chapter he is clearly excited by the wildness of the landscape, scathing in the rich tourist culture he found in Palm Beach, and has very interesting and original observations to make about the direction of American capitalism and expansionism. My advice: borrow a copy (don't buy it) an read the final chapter. You don't really need to look into the rest of the book.
March 27, 2022
This book is from a different time and written in a style used in the past. Yet an interesting read of the U.S. East Coast over a century ago .
Currently reading
February 13, 2008Learning about what James saw upon his triumphant return to his native land and how he himself embraced the nativism enveloping it.
April 10, 2011
Another one for the James completists like me.
October 13, 2015
Late period Henry James, writing about his trip to America in 1904. Endlessly long sentences, dry as dust, incomprehensible. Most of the time I had not the slightest clue what he was trying to say.
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