Henry James Was Not at Home in America

Summary

a gigantic and elaborate … monument to all that isn’t socially possible there. It’s, in effect, like a gorgeous practical joke—but at one’s own expense, after all, if one has to live in solitude in these league-long marble halls, & sit in alternate Gothic and Palladian cathedrals, as it were—where now only the temperature stalks about—with the “regrets,” sighing along the wind, of those who have declined.… I feel that in speaking of it as I have, I don’t do justice to the house as a phenomenon (of brute achievement). But that truly wd. take me too far! It’s only as a place to live in, & in the conditions fatally imposed, that I, before it, threw up my hands—!The problem with the grotesquely wealthy is similar to that of the impoverished—they are people who fail to mix with, move into, and maintain those common, well-mannered social spaces that preceded them. On the one hand, there was the Yiddish theater district, which made the New York streets “unspeakable” with their “bacchanal, so hugely hatted and feathered and flounced”; on the other, there were those “white elephants” James drives past in Newport, which he describes as “vast and blank, for reminder to those concerned of the prohibited degrees of witlessness, and of the peculiarly awkward vengeances of affronted proportion and discretion. These newly erected mansions and “unspeakable” urban altercations were commensurate examples of America’s “perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there had been a past to repudiate.” Conversely, what James loves about Europe is the beauties that outlasted, and “civilized,” the past’s violences and upheavals that produced them.James grew up in a large, boisterously intelligent family. His father, Henry Sr., had lost his right leg to extraordinarily painful childhood surgeries (without anesthetic) and used the large inheritance from his father to read deeply in various disciplines, eventually favoring the great theosophist crackpot, Swedenborg. With his wife, he traveled ...