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A Place of Wounds

Henry James goes home again Near Braddock, Pennsylvania, 1891. Photo by William Rau. | ExplorePAHistory

Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age by Peter Brooks. New York Review Books, 248 pages. 2025.

There are essential lines toward the finish of Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous 1940 novel You Can’t Go Home Againthat so uncannily apply to Henry James in the final years of the nineteenth century they might have been put down with him in mind:

You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood . . . back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism . . . to one’s youthful idea of “the artist” and the all-sufficiency of “art” and “beauty” and “love” . . . back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

Or rather, you cango back home again to those things except that they won’t be there waiting for you in any recognizable form.

When Henry James fled his homeland for Europe in 1875, he did so with the abiding belief that America was too anemic for a novelist of his particular lot, its culture and traditions too skimpy on intellectual substance. Europe had at its back the heft and breadth of eons, whereas America was a comparative kid without a compass, without a past of much distinction or a present of much promise. The nation was still attempting to define its singular selfhood, still stretching westward, still subduing prairies—it was much too busy building itself up to sit itself down and ponder the vital questions of society and art that James would make central to his undertaking as our unmatched novelist of manners. The author of the unremarkable novella Watch and Ward, which James later came to disown, had to become the refined world author of The Golden Bowl.

Here we can hitch Nathaniel Hawthorne to James to look at the simultaneous accuracy and inaccuracy of James’s conviction about the anemia of his homeland (and one of James’s critical achievements, though by no means his finest, in his 1879 book on Hawthorne). In his preface to The Marble Faun, Hawthorne tells us that “no author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my own dear native land.” Never mind for now the absurdity of those lines when you consider that the inconceivable carnage of the Civil War was only one short year away—the lines mirror James’s own sentiments as he opted to abscond to Europe. In his book on Hawthorne, James teaches us “that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion.”

But, also in his book on Hawthorne, James tells us that an American novelist couldwrite an eternal masterpiece from inside what D.H. Lawrence dubbed the “Evening Land.”  Of The Scarlet Letter, he observes: “Something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as anything that had been received, and the best of it was that the thing was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New England.” And years after the Hawthorne book, in his autobiography Notes of a Son and Brother, James writes that the tone of Hawthorne’s work is “ever so appreciably American; which proved to what a use American matter could be put by an American hand . . . an American could be an artist, one of the finest, without ‘going outside’ about it.” And in the Hawthorne book: “Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the American genius.” James didn’t have to ship off after all.

But James wasn’t Hawthorne. He didn’t wish to face maturity as a writer of “romance,” by which Hawthorne means the antithesis to staid realism; a fiction not bound by probabilities, free to delve into the shimmering darknesses that frame a human life and infect a human soul. For Hawthorne’s storytelling sensibility and Puritan cogitations—James never knew whatto make of Hawthorne’s religious hues—America would do just fine. But for the Balzacian task that James set for himself, only Europe provided the social lot upon which he’d construct the edifice to house his tremendous art.

The fallacy of James’s conviction might well be borne out in Twain, Dickinson, Emerson, Poe, Melville, and Whitman. But for James and the constancy of his character, the fixity of his personality, and the complexity of his upbringing, Europe—first Paris, then London—was an artistic and social destiny. Lofty snob too good for the soil that sprouted him? Maybe. But with a family that dazzling and difficult—William the philosopher was one year older, Alice the diarist five younger, his father the exacting theologian, his mother no doubt tapping her foot, wondering when he’d marry—James had plenty of non-literary reasons for flight.

If You Can’t Go Home Againcould have served as James’s expatriated adage in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the title of Thomas Wolfe’s first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, sums up the start of the twentieth. Peter Brooks’s profound new study Henry James Comes Home—a follow-up to his equally profound Henry James Goes to Paris—meticulously examines James’s The American Scene, the result of his ten-month return home in 1904, when James was sixty-one, a return in which he fancied himself a “restless analyst” of a homeland gigantically altered from the rustic little place he had fled. Brooks writes that “the return in 1904 and 1905 was driven in part by nostalgia but also by the sense that he was missing something: that the United States was now a force that he had to reckon with directly.” James would become, in Brooks’s estimation, “something close to an anthropologist wanting to study the behaviors and thought systems of this unknown new breed of Americans.” His term “thought systems” is precisely what Wolfe means when he refers to “the old systems of things which once seemed everlasting.”

It’s difficult to think of the intellectually stalwart and emotionally vested James as being infected with so whimsical and precious a feeling as nostalgia. There is something solider in play. In his introduction to The American Essays of Henry James, Leon Edel, James’s eminent biographer, sees that James’s essays “are the work of a writer who was always aware of his country’s claim upon him and upon his art.” James’s “mind, and the pen that guided it, were ever concerned with the American consciousness and the American character.” (Savor that formulation a moment: the mind guided by the pen, and not, as many would have it, the other way about.)

Edel judges The American Scene “a long and ruminative poem, a brilliant reverie over persons and places, the tone of old things, the sense of James’s American past.” And at the close of his 1989 preface to the reprint of James’s American essays, Edel does not equivocate: “No one, among American writers, was more contemporary or had a more powerful grasp of American history and American myth.” In his essay on the now forgotten novelist Henry Harland, James himself contends that “a writer must needs draw his sap from the soil of his origin.” And in The American Scene, he puts it this way: “One’s supreme relation, as one has always put it, was one’s relation to one’s country.” Curious conversions of mind for a writer who had once been so certain of his country’s inadequacy for the artist.

Here Brooks sets the sociopolitical scene for James’s return:

From 1882 to 1904, the United States lived out its Gilded Age, with railroads extending their reach everywhere, industry developing on a titanic scale, corporations achieving dominance in finance (and politics) . . . The future of the world now seemed to belong to the country [James] had long ago abandoned as provincial.

And speaking of finance: in a letter to his brother William, James insisted that “the matter is absolutely economic.” He needed the money his literary lectures would net him. Absolutely, but not exclusively, as he points out in the same letter: his return “would carry with it also the possibilities of the prose of production(that is of production of prose) such as no other mere bought, paid for, skeptically and halfheartedly worried-through adventure, by land or sea, would be able to give me.” In other words: the writer with arguably the most fertile novelistic mind in the American canon was in need of material. He told William Dean Howells as much, with a characteristically Jamesian upper-case: “I am hungry for Material.”

Brooks does a fine job marshaling—as a matter of fact, mastering—James’s frenetic itinerary: first the Jersey shore to the mansion of George Harvey, president of Harper and Brothers, then off to Boston and Cambridge with William and his wife, Alice; then northward to their New Hampshire summer home. There were minor stops before the major train expedition: Cape Cod; Salisbury, Connecticut; and Lenox, Massachusetts with Edith Wharton. James was testing the water in familiar places before plunging his whole self into a homeland that had become an alien nation. From New York he’d set off down the east coast for Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Asheville, Charleston, Palm Beach, then Augustine. Then, before heading west, back up to Boston for what Brooks calls “extensive dentistry” (and there are moments in James’s letters when you suspect that his ailing teeth were the real reason for his return home). Westward looked like this: St. Louis, Chicago, South Bend, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Monterey, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle before turning eastward again via St. Paul.

If Brooks is right that James’s 1904 trip would produce “one of the most penetrating sociological analyses ever written about the United States,” that penetrating analysis is oftentimes difficult to penetrate and nearly impossible to summarize: James has a great deal to say about a great many places, and he says it in the labyrinthine and maddingly figurative manner that characterizes his late-period prose. By the time he got to What Maisie Knewin 1897, he’d fallen so far down the metaphorical, elliptical rabbit hole he’d forgotten how to say anything plainly because he’d forsaken how to seeanything plainly. (In letters, William knuckle-rapped him over this more than once.) Well, if you want plain, Orwell is right there. James’s delving, connective mind is onto something else, and nothing as complex, contoured, and contorted as American society in the first years of the twentieth century can be properly understood without an intricate unraveling by a mind that misses nothing.

Still, clear themes and distinct observations appear in The American Scene,and most are not complimentary. New York, his birthplace, gets a lashing: “The waterside squalor of the great city put forth its most inimitable notes, showed so true to the barbarisms it had not outlived that one could only fall to wondering what obscure inward virtue had preserved it.” Skyscrapers, “giants of the mere market,” nauseate him; elevators anger him; the entire city is now a monument to capitalist planning, which means it cannot truly becomeitself. Herd mentality abounds; superficiality is everywhere; language has been profaned; wealth serves no significance beyond itself. Emersonian self-reliance has run amok and morphed into the vulgarity of instant gratification. People are on a mission “to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any price,” which puts you in mind of Whitman’s lines: “Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world.”

What James sees manifested in New York—“Remarkable, unspeakable New York!”— he will see manifested elsewhere in the nation:

What prevails, what sets the tune, is the American scale of gain, more magnificent than any other, and the fact that the whole assumption, the whole theory of life, is that of the individual’s participation in it  . . . To make so much money that you won’t, that you don’t “mind,” don’t mind anything—that is absolutely, I think, the main American formula. Thus your making no money—or so little that it passes there for none—and being thereby distinctly reduced to minding, amounts to your being reduced to the knowledge that America is no place for you.

The American scale of gain can lead only to vast economic disparity. If James is dumbfounded and disgusted by the wealth gap he witnesses in 1904, you can imagine how he would view what’s happened in this country in the past few decades. James’s complaints multiply in New Hampshire, where the loveliness of the landscape nevertheless lacks the “form”—and formis always a clutch, loaded word in James—which would have been provided by the squire and the parson. He saw wastefulness and carelessness in our presiding over the land that created what he most despised: ugliness. Philadelphia, however, pleases him because it is, “beyond any other American city, a society,” while Washington delights him, “the City of Conversation,” as he once called it. He was the guest of Henry Adams, and he lunched with Teddy Roosevelt, despite each man’s animosity for the other. (James would lunch with anyone if it meant, well, lunch.)

In the South, he finds resentment and a lack of rapprochement, while nearly everything he sees underlines “the immense, grotesque, defeated project” of slavery. General Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond speaks of “something more than the melancholy of a lost cause. The whole infelicity speaks of a cause that could never have been gained.” And Florida? “You may in fact live there with an idea, if you are content that your idea shall consist of grapefruit and oranges.” St. Louis is bleak and “bourgeois,” Chicago presents “an unimagined dreariness” while flaunting its “power, huge and augmenting, power, power (vast, mechanical, industrial, social, financial) everywhere!”

In the many hotels he stays in, James sees a microcosm of the country at large, a “hotel-civilization” or “hotel-spirit,” and when he says it, he isn’t smiling. The leisure industry that had begun baring its teeth resulted in what Brooks beautifully calls “a stultifying sameness.” If there was anything guaranteed to stir the ire of James, it was the cult of conformity birthed by uncaged capitalism. He rails against “the jealous cultivation of the common mean, the common mean only, the reduction of everything to an average of decent suitability.” The sameness of hotel-civilization, duping eager citizens who can’t distinguish the genuine from the fraudulent, offends James’s sacred sense of American individuality. Hotels, smug and presumptuous, are attempting to define for their guests what is opulent, enjoyable, comfortable. Brooks cogently suggests that in his denunciations of hotel-civilization, James foresaw the gaudy abomination of Disneyland and with it the invention of plastic, which was invented in 1907, the very year of The American Scene.

Out West, only California earns his approbation: “This extraordinary California at the end of the awful dusty grind, this great blooming garden-realm, enclosed between the grand mountains & the Pacific, is, so far as nature goes, as fair a reward for the pilgrimage.” To Alice, he admits that the Golden State “has completely bowled me over—such a delicious difference from the rest of the U.S. do I find in it.” James died in 1916, several years before Hollywood would begin its uncontested dominance over American popular culture. For a thinker who loathed the inauthentic, the nefarious influence of wealth in all things, and being told what to value, Hollywood, had he lived to see it, would likely have struck James as repellent. Celluloid, after all, is plastic.

Like any genius, James can be apprehended only through paradox and antinomy; you can’t situate him in any tidy system. He decries the ravages of uncaged capitalism and materialism while bellyaching that some of its luxuries—in hotels, on trains—are not sophisticated enough. He laments the apotheosis of Mammon and yet finds country clubs, a familiar seat for Mammon, “charming.” He lauds America as the promise of the world and yet isn’t sure he likes that many immigrants, all those accents, Italians who have misplaced the ancient charisma they radiate in their own land. He complains of the near total social separation of men and women—men had absented themselves to chase their fortunes, leaving women at the helm of cultural consorting—while taking large lecture fees from female literary clubs. He values democracy and its underpinnings of presumed equality and yet can’t stomach the degree to which American society has watered down legal and social differences (for James, proper manners meant people knowing their proper places).

When The American Scenewas published in this country in 1907, Harper and Brothers amputated the final chapter—though James’s UK publisher did not—because, as Brooks writes, “they constitute a fierce indictment of what the country has done to itself.” From the comfort of his Pullman car as it passes through “shabby and sordid” environs in South Carolina, James realizes the “awful modern privilege of this detached yet concentrated stare at the misery of subject populations.” He then reaches back to one of the great sins of this nation’s founding and summons the voice of a Native American: “Beauty and charm would be for me in the solitude you have ravaged, and I should owe you my grudge for every disfigurement and every violence, for every wound with which you have caused the face of the land to bleed.” This imaginative summoning of the displaced voice encapsulates every social and aesthetic problem James has witnessed. Brooks puts a fine gloss on it: “What he found in his native land was a cause for alarm and sorrow. It was a place of wounds that weren’t being taken care of. A place of irresponsible capitalism.”

A place of wounds—and had James remained in America to live it, to write it, truly, daily, from within? Would he have made such harsh assessments? Perhaps. Twain did. With Henry James Comes Home, Brooks has given a tremendous gift to James’s devotees, an astute, discerning investigation into James’s complex accord with his homeland and its people. He is correct in seeing that the whole of The American Scenecan be considered a sustained investigation into, and criticism of, the democratic principle. Being an American, James knew, is “a complex fate.” In 1956, Leon Edel saw that James’s “understanding of the destiny of America, its future role as a nation among nations” leant his work “about his own country and its people a singular relevance today.” That same work is relevant still because it comprehends America’s destiny that nearly never was, its past that has disfigured so much of its present, and its present damning so much of its future.