Henry James Revisited

...Roderick Hudson and The American have unlikely plots and plausible emotions, which is a very pleasant change from those contemporary novels where home, job, toothpaste brand and nervous antagonism can all be verified, but what the hero wants of the world, no one will venture to say...

...Roland Mallet undertakes to support Roderick with the ease of a man used to putting money into profitable ventures...

...James liked worldliness, and a reader's spirits rise when Roderick Hudson moves from the rectitude and simplicity of a small New England town to the golden air and complex moral texture of Rome...

...James was interested in the manners and actual physical style of being an American...

...Tristram-not very prepossessing personally, but sympathetic, curious, garrulous, and remorselessly observant...

...they are more ruthless, but also more clearsighted...

...But Newman helped to brace his prose, and to keep out of it the cold, thinblooded and priggish strain that his brother William warned him could pop into his stories and freeze the genial current...

...When he proposes to the aristocratic Madame de Cintre, he mentions the size of his fortune and offers to go into detail...

...We feel that the sterling qualities of the American are attractive to him at a distance, but Europe, which shows less squeamishness about admitting the worst, is his natural element...

...Contemplating her gracefulness and breeding, he classes her as "an expensive article," and her image is as distinct "as the large figure on a banknote...

...But if James had too inspired a grasp of what can rub us the wrong way, he could also be very infectious about life in its promising aspect...

...To the American, money is something that can be talked about, a sign of virtue, and the proof of hard work...

...and a face like Christopher Newman's ("frigid yet friendly, shrewd yet credulous something vaguely defiant in its concessions and something profoundly reassuring in its reserve") may still appear on a passing American train...

...Asked if she likes Paris, Madame de Bellegarde answers that she knows her house and her friends, she does not know Paris...

...He wrote all the more passionately (especially in these first novels) about everything that precedes it: the capture of fancy, the nature of partiality and choice, the whole unaccountable process (except that he was able to give an account) of gravitation toward one person and rejection of another...

...Roderick Hudson is a poor young sculptor brought to Rome for study and stimulation by a man of means who is eager to find an absorbing interest...

...James' Europeans know more about themselves...

...Reviewed by ISA KAPP Contributor, the "Reporter" "Commentary," "Kenyon Review" Although Henry James was mainly drawn to the passive and corruptible side of character that people like to hide, some of his sturdiest and most humorous writing deals with exterior matters that we are just as curious about...

...and although he eventually plans to involve us in his usual antagonisms of will and outlook, he first hovers with enjoyable realism on a very public aspect of his characters' behavior, their attitude toward money...

...But as far as is known, James had no experience of sex itself, and it is natural that he did not describe it...

...Instead of the specific plate of escargots or the small Parisian square into which most of us try to compress the pleasure of going to Europe, he conjures up the effect of a place on the spirits and behavior and conversation of the newcomer...

...A great deal is made of the parched quality of life in the Old World, with its self-imposed limits...

...There is often in his novels a woman like Newman's friend, Mrs...

...Probably more upsetting to a cheerful modern reader is James' dreadful X-ray eye for all that can go wrong between people, the subtle transmission of emotional cramp, chills or condescension that most of us have to be vague about to spare our feelings...

...This time he is reinvesting in the broadening range of experience, but behind his gamble for art and beauty we feel the confidence of the businessman relying on unlimited resources of American raw material...

...His earliest novels, Roderick Hudson and The American (now reissued in a handsome replica of the New York edition), are both about Americans in Europe for the first time, but for once the opposing forces are practical and visible before they turn moral...

...Christopher Newman (The American) has come to Paris for the products of civilization: large paintings, and a wife perfected by mysterious European ceremonies and processes...

...If a man has earned it, he has the right to treat himself to pleasure...

...There is always an exciting audacity and lack of self-righteousness in the speech of Christina Light, the girl for whom Roderick lets his talent go to waste...

...Yet James, always balancing losses, implies that Americans, despite their appealing artlessness and their wholesome desire "to stretch out and haul in," have missed out on something important...

...We may long, in the middle of this century, to be healthy animals, but we don't have simple hearts, and our love is at the mercy of words...

...The personable figure of Newman, with his Yankee whimsicality, his optimism, and his liking for physical rather than imaginative exertion, represented everything that James was not...

...Raised by European standards, she places a higher value on exactness than upon generosity, and is honest to an extent that, James implies, is only possible to those who are somewhat wicked...

...Really the James mentality, which makes sex so much a funetion of the imagination, is not absolutely alien to us...

...In The American a man actually takes a woman in his arms, and in Roderick Hudson we often sense a strong physical attraction between the characters...

...He is always answering to our satisfaction an old-fashioned question that no longer seems to come up much in social discourse: What impression did it make on you...

...James takes absolute possession of us when one of his travelers comes to a strange city...

...James is surprisingly plain in saying what his Americans expect of Europe...

...To these travelers who are willing to turn their pockets and their motives inside out, the secretive, hoarding pride of the Europeans is shocking...

...Madame de Cintre's relations guard their money along with their status, and eventually prevent her marriage to Newman out of their traditional repugnance for "a commercial person...

...And there is usually some scene of great atmospheric charm, like the one where Roderick, stretched out on his overcoat in the late Roman autumn beneath the high-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi, theorizes that he can do equally as well as Michelangelo's Moses...

...Newman envisions the world as a large bazaar where he can stroll about and purchase handsome things...