Collected Travel Writings

...The national temperament deeply enjoys the unbroken order and tradition of its church...

...Why fight against Fate, or lift these absurdities which are now mountainous...

...The French book describes a tour of the provinces and is illustrated with ninety-four sketches by Joseph Pennell, whose original illustrations for James's books on Italy and on England are also reproduced by the Library of America...

...The first volume covers the Continent: it includes A Little Tour in France, first published in 1884, and Italian Hours, first issued in book form in 1909 but consisting largely of magazine pieces from the 1870s...

...And, memorably: It is with religion as with marriage...

...his complaint against the tourists' Florida was that the human soil was too thin for a writer...

...It is interesting that James shies away from writing about the capital—something he does not do in Italy or England or America...

...THE CONTINENT Henry James Library of America/ 846 and 845 pages / $35 each reviewed by DONALD LYONS 66 The American Spectator March 1994 the better manners, the poetry: Dissent has the dusty brick chapels in provincial by-streets, the names out of Dickens, the uncertain tenure of the h...

...Florida is the final thing the author casts his eyes upon in this dark book...

...The young man tells James that his father was a hero of the Confederacy and that he himself would welcome the opportunity to match his father's deeds...

...It takes us through some cathedral towns and mildly pastoral landscapes in southern England but finds its true topic in London, "hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all overwhelming" London...

...He begins with a "first impression" of it on "a wet, black Sunday"--the word impression is a key to these writings, which often achieve an amazing verbal equivalence to the blurrily hypnotic paintings of Whistler...

...the tough old man confronts a loud continent...

...Among the latest to appear, numbers 64 and 65, are the travel writings of Henry James (1843-1916), edited by Richard Howard...

...again and again in this odd book his mandarin spirit turns savagely to ask of America hard, tough, angry, real questions...

...even the hotel was "vast and cool and fair, friendly, breezy, shiny, swabbed and burnished like a royal yacht, really immaculate and delightful...

...For human interest he relies heavily on novelists, confessing "I am most haunted with the London of Dickens," finding Kensington "ThaCkerayan," and deciding that Warwickshire, "this happy mixture of lawn and river and mirrored spire and blooming garden," was really the ideal setting for one of George Eliot's heroines to be playing "lawn-tennis...

...Wholly unawed, he declared that universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints...

...just so, he likened California to a "sort of prepared but unconscious and inexperienced Italy, the primitive plate, in perfect condition, but with the impression of History all yet to be made...

...He likens the "Washington Obelisk" to a "loud monosyllable .. . uttered, in a preoccupied company, without a due production of sympathy orsense...

...In this, his best book, Emerson brought a preternaturally keen Yankee eye, at once leveling and transcendentalizing...

...Hours" was clearly felt to be an evocative, liquescent, pre-Raphaelite word...

...Italy spoke to something deeper in Henry James than France, and Italian Hours is the richer and more echoing book...

...The religion of England is part of good-breeding...

...Florida irritated James...

...but, like all the Italian acting I have seen, it was wanting in finesse, that shade of the shade by which, and by which alone, one really knows art...

...As the "air" told him, he couldn't help loving the awful place...

...to the spectacle of England...

...Oxford is a library, and the professors must be librarians...

...In 1904, at 61, James sailed to America after a twenty-year absence...

...James sees that "he wouldn't have hurt a Northern fly" but wonders what, "all fair, engaging, smiling, as he stood there, he would have done to a Southern negro...

...The great city became for the expatriate James the modern monster par excellence, "the particular spot in the world which communicates the greatest sense of life...

...Italy, wearing its art and all its senses on its sleeve, was the vibrant anti-America...

...Heading downtown to the Jewish Lower East Side, he is nonplussed at the swarming life but shrewdly contrasts the "light" and "serenity" of the New York Ghetto with the "dark, foul, stifling Ghettos" of old Europe...

...But he is a major witness...

...looking at the ancient Latin-inscribed city walls of Rome, James tellingly contrasts them with "the raw plank fences of a Boston suburb, inscribed with the virtues of healing drugs...

...From it all, he wrote up The American Scene, published in 1907 when he was back in Europe for good, and consisting of fourteen chapters that go down from New England to Florida...

...what you are making would doubtless impress me more than what you are leaving unmade, for in that case it wouldn't be to you that I should be looking in any degree for beauty or for charm...

...He pretends to have expected it to be the country of his boyhood romances, a "fantastic Florida, with its rank vegetation and its warm heroic, amorous air...

...afterwards, when his mind is opened to the reason of the conduct of life, he is asked, what he thinks of the institution of marriage, and of the right relations of the sexes...

...he appreciates the "graceful" White House and "adores" the Capitol, comparing its capacity to "entertain" (a word James intends in the high, imaginative sense) to that of St...

...The university must be retrospective...

...I think," he says, that the romance of a winter afternoon in London arises partly from the fact that, when it is not altogether smothered, the general lamplight takes on . . something of a cheer of red lights in a storm...

...But for all of James's apprehending genius his London—his England, indeed—seldom goes deeper than such impressionist wash...

...As analyst of High Victorian civilization, James rarely does better than this: Conservatism has the cathedrals, the colleges, the castles, the gardens, the traditions, the associations, the fine names, COLLECTED TRAVEL WRITINGS: I. GREAT BRITAIN AND AMERICA II...

...The last page promises an account of the West, but it was never written...

...The clacketing train boasts of its transformation of the virgin landscape: "See what I'm making of all this—see what I'm making, what I'm making...

...The American Scene is a dense, difficult, almost eerie book...

...One rubbed one's eyes, but there, at its highest polish, shining in the beautiful day, was the brazen face of history, and there, all about one, immaculate, the printless pavements of the State...

...he is amused by it...

...I should have much to say," he might reply, "if the question were open, but I have a wife and children, and all question is closed for me...

...Peter's in his beloved Rome...

...Yet we all send our sons to college, and, though he be a genius, he must take his chance...

...enough, however, to be sure that, for all its humanity of irony, it wasn't so good as Moliere...

...Before leaving Richmond, James remarks on the strangely "desolate space" surrounding the very high equestrian statue of Lee, just as he had earlier criticized the General Sherman in New York's Central Park as too peaceful...

...Europe is certainly the continent of the practiced stare...

...If he saw Europe in affectionately soft focus, over here, at home, he looked with the unsparing eye of family...

...a beautiful red man with a tomahawk"), and the Civilized Traveler, James is nobly worrying about mere material advance without respect for the beauty that preceded it or the culture that alone can elevate it...

...He visits, in a compassionate but diagnostic spirit, the Museum of the Confederacy, run by a "little old lady, a person softvoiced, gracious, mellifluous, perfect for her function, who, seated by her fire in a sort of official ante-room, received him as at the gate of some grandly bankrupt plantation...

...New York City was the biggest, loudest fact of all...

...The second of these volumes discusses travels about Great Britain and America...

...It was the people that bothered him—bothered him finally for being not individual enough, for being merely types, and types, be it said, such as pushy women and bratty children that James had limited tolerance for...

...For instance, leaving the small Burgundy town of Beaune (where he missed seeing the town's glory, a Roger van der Weyden, because the nuns in whose hospital it resides were having dinner), James says, "I carried away from Beaune the impression of something mildly autumnal—something rusty yet kindly, like the taste of a sweet russet pear...

...But Washington James likes...

...These few words are virtually the only thing he wrote about California, and yet he got it in the womb...

...Such is the colour of the interior glow of the clubs in Pall Mall, which I positively like best when the fog loiters upon their monumental staircases...

...he bustled about, lecturing all over the East Coast and the Midwest and the West Coast...

...The faded Puritanism of Boston, of Concord, of Salem does not excite James as New York did...

...Alert to hidden currents in America as he was not always in Europe, the traveler sees the South as having never faced "the thumping legacy of the intimate presence of the negro...

...This pales next to the most trenchant American book on England, Emerson's English Traits (1856...

...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...

...He lets neither side take refuge in easy icons...

...The place contained only "sorry objects . . . already sallow with time," but James had the born novelist's luck to meet, staring at "the same sad glass case," a "gallant and nameless, as well as a vet), The American Spectator March 1994 67 handsome, young Virginian," and they do the museum together...

...James's imagination was ever on the hunt for curious human stories...

...n poor Richmond, the anti/ Washington, the still freshly defeated negative to D.C.' s triumphant positive, James excels himself in evoking the place's "taste" of the "very essence of the old Southern idea—the project extravagant, fantastic, and today pathetic in its folly, of a vast Slave State...

...It is often forgotten, by the way, that James was a New Yorker by birth and knew New England only in his twenties...

...What would he have made of the faux Italy that did, as he foresaw, arise...

...It is a thought-provoking, almost a tragic, tableau that James slyly sets before us...

...The Germans," he grimly notes, "are noted as taking the view that the insignia of the Red Cross . . . are in all circumstances a good mark for their shots, a view characteristic of their belligerent system at large...

...also arrayed in neat pot-hats, shoddy suits and light overcoats, with their pockets, I am sure, full of photographs and cigarettes: circumstances all that quickened their resemblance, on the much bigger scale, to Japanese celebrities, or to specimens, on show, of what the Government can do with people with whom it is supposed to be able to do nothing...

...true, he had at his disposal "the velvet air" and the sea and "the admirable pale-skinned orange" and "the huge sun-warmed grape-fruit, plucked from the low bough, where it fairly bumps your cheek for solicitation...

...James, ecologically minded avant la lettre, roars back: If I were one of the painted savages you have dispossessed...

...The French book runs to picturesque glimpses of spots like Tours and Avignon and Toulouse and Dijon...

...the Florida of the Seminoles and the Everglades, of the high old Spanish dons and the passionate Creole beauties...

...The reality was eating in "buffet cars" on noisy trains and sojourning in jammed hotels...

...The acting was capital—broad, free and natural...

...He goes to see a Goldoni farce: I could but half follow it...

...On its steps, he reports, I met one morning a trio of Indian braves, braves dispossessed of forest and prairie but as free of the builded labyrinth as they had ever been of these...

...Such savage penetration, both complaisant and revolutionary, Olympian in its very rudeness, was alien alike to the manners and to the mind of James...

...He wanted to take the pulse of the New World in the newcentury...

...0 68 The American Spectator March 1994...

...James goes for a walk in midtown New York, "remarkable, unspeakable New York," and listens to "the voice of the air," which nags him to admit that "you care for the terrible town...

...James's was not the only soul to be darkened by contemplation of lateGilded Age America...

...ing at them and the beggars lining all the approaches...

...He samples a Bowery beer-cellar, "a large semi-subterranean establishment"—it is all a bit like the Pope at a ball game, stiff but basically good-humored...

...The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity...

...He compared Florida to a Cleo-less Egypt before Pharaohs and Pyramids...

...think of late Twain or Henry Adams or, for that matter, Dreiser...

...There is an excitement in his voice when he's writing about Rome, where everybody's outdoors: Who does the vulgar stay-at-home work of Rome...

...His book on England, English Hours, is largely a collection, published in 1905, of pieces written for the Nation in the 1870s...

...Again, that sting in the Jamesian honey...

...On the train going back north, in the book's last, crazy pages, James has a fierce argument with his Pullman car...

...In this Platonic dialogue among the Railroad, the Painted Savage (a.k.a...

...A youth marries in haste...

...He goes to a Yiddish play...

...They seemed just then and there, for a mind fed betimes on the Leatherstocking Tales, to project, as in a flash, an image in itself immense, but foreshortened and simplified—reducing to a single smooth stride the bloody footsteps of time...

...it has the air of a portfolio of watercolor sketches, charming but superficial...

...B y a paradox that will not perhaps surprise those who know his deepest late novels like The Golden Bowl (1904), James's greatest travel writing was stimulated not by the Europe where he passed so much of his life but by a return, a nostos, a homecoming, to the land of his birth...

...the play of talk easier than life itself...

...The great difference between public places in America and Europe is in the number of unoccupied people of every age and condition sitting about early and late on benches and gazing at you, from your hat to your boots, as you pass...

...All the grandees and half the foreigners are there in their carriages, the bourgeoisie on foot starDonald Lyons is the author of the new book, Independent Visions: A Critical Introduction to Recent Independent American Film (Ballantine...

...There are a few short uncollected pieces at the back of this volume, one dating from November 1914 and consisting of a public plea, written in James's late sensitive style, for the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps in France...