Travels With Henry James Read online

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  Designed by Trish Wilkinson

  The photograph of Henry James on the jacket was taken from the frontispiece of Short Story Classics (American), Volume Three, ed. William Patten, copyright © 1905, printed by P.F. Collier & Son. Photographer unknown. Wikimedia.

  A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 978-1-56858-578-9 (e-book)

  10987654321

  CONTENTS

  Foreword, by Hendrik Hertzberg

  Introduction: A Little Tour with Henry James, by Michael Anesko

  Saratoga

  Lake George

  From Lake George to Burlington

  Newport

  Niagara

  A European Summer: Lichfield and Warwick

  A European Summer: North Devon

  A European Summer: Wells and Salisbury

  A European Summer: From Chambery to Milan

  The Parisian Stage

  A European Summer: From Venice to Strassburg

  The After-Season at Rome

  Homburg Reformed

  An Ex-Grand-Ducal Capital

  Autumn in Florence

  Tuscan Cities

  Ravenna

  London Sights

  London in the Dead Season

  In Scotland

  The London Theatres

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  FOREWORD

  Hendrik Hertzberg

  HENRY JAMES WAS A COCKSURE FREELANCER OF TWENTY-TWO when he published, in the November 16, 1865, issue of a four-month-old weekly called The Nation, one of American literature’s most notorious pans.a He judged a book he anonymously reviewed—Drum-Taps, a collection of what he dismissed as “spurious poetry”—“an offense against art,” “clumsy,” “monstrous,” devoid of “common sense,” and “aggressively careless, inelegant, and ignorant.” Having laid the groundwork, the future author of The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Turn of the Screw, and much, much more, proceeded to address himself directly to the offending versifier, scolding him as follows: “To become adopted as a national poet, it is not enough to discard everything in particular and to accept everything in general, to amass crudity upon crudity, to discharge the undigested contents of your blotting-book into the lap of the public. You must respect the public you address; for it has taste, if you have not. . . . It is not enough to be rude, lugubrious, and grim. You must also be serious.”

  Forgive him. He was young and full of beans. In time, of course, Henry James would change his mind about Walt Whitman—so much so that by 1904, he and Edith Wharton were spending long evenings joyously reading to each other from Leaves of Grass. (As James read, Wharton would recall, “his voice filled the hushed room like an organ adagio,” and he exclaimed, “Oh, yes, a great genius, undoubtedly a very great genius!”b) At about the same time, in a letter to a friend who had teased him about that long-ago review, he was theatrically contrite. It was a “disgrace,” he lamented, a “little atrocity” that he had “perpetrated [on Whitman] in the gross impudence of youth.” He added, “I only know that I haven’t seen the accursed thing for more than thirty years, and that if it were to cross my path nothing would induce me to look at it. I am so far from ‘keeping’ the abominations of my early innocence that I destroy them whenever I spy them—which, thank goodness, occurs rarely.”c

  Thank goodness the mature James was in no position to destroy his youthful abominations, none of which, by the way, were abominable. (Even his rash demolition of Whitman crackles with thrilling exuberance.) The travel pieces collected here make the case. Besides being delightful in their own right, these youthful nonabominations are important for what they presage. They are among the first stirrings of a great career with few parallels among American and British writers—or among writers of any nationality, for that matter—of the period between the American Civil War and World War I. (For literature, the Gilded Age was twenty-four-carat gold.)

  Samuel Johnson’s immortal wisecrack—“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”—didn’t apply to Henry James. Not quite, anyway. Strictly speaking, James didn’t “need” money. His father, Henry James Sr., had inherited the equivalent today of some $8 million and was generally willing to supply a letter of credit whenever one of his children was short of ready cash. Henry Jr. loved his father and mother and his brothers and sister, but he also loved independence. He wanted only to write, and he wanted to write what he wanted to write, and he wanted to go where he wanted to go, and he wanted to answer to no one but himself. Ultimately, he wrote to make art. But he also wrote to unencumber himself, to free himself to make art. He wrote to write. For him, writing was its own purpose—but not its only purpose, not every time he sat down at his writing table.

  In an era when relatively few members of the literate middle-and upper-middle classes could afford to travel for pleasure, touring by surrogate was the next best thing. There was a healthy market for travel writing. It was a circulation builder, and the magazines were eager to cash in. Even a small, intellectually elite journal like The Nation—which, then as now, lived for politics, with a sideline in cultural criticism—wanted in on the action.

  In a modest way, so did James. Money seldom motivates writers at today’s Nation, but for James at yesterday’s, it was high on the list. The fees he earned for these pieces—$50 each—may not sound like much, but they were enough to take him much of the way toward self-sufficiency as he meandered through the northeastern United States, Britain, and Western Europe during the 1870s, piling up impressions that, sooner or later, would turn up in his novels and stories.

  Henry James was, almost literally, a born traveler. He was barely six months old in October 1843, when, with his family, he crossed the Atlantic for the first time. (The Jameses went in style, aboard the Great Western, a paddle-wheel, wooden-hulled steamship of unprecedented size and luxury.) He made four more crossings in his teens, attending a bewildering variety of schools, studying with a succession of private tutors, and making of himself a bilingual habitué of London, Paris, and Geneva. In the 1860s he was back in the United States, mostly in Boston and Cambridge. He didn’t return to Europe until 1869, this time as a full-grown man and emphatically on his own, for fifteen months of intensive travel—London again, Paris again, Geneva again, and then, in a state of something like ecstasy, Italy: Milan, Verona, Padua, Venice, Pisa, Naples, Genoa, Florence, and Rome. When he came home again to Cambridge, he was twenty-seven. He had not yet written a book and was not yet famous, but his reviews and stories had made him a favorite of the editors of the better magazines. Leon Edel, the definitive James biographer, summarizes his subject’s next move—and th
e motives behind it:

  He was barely resettled in Quincy Street in the early summer of 1870 when he persuaded The Nation to accept a series of travel articles from his pen—pictures of Rhode Island, Vermont, New York. It was an opportunity to earn some ready money; it was also a way of convincing The Nation how lively a travel writer he could be—especially if he were in Europe.

  There was, however, a deeper prompting. He would be “haunted and wracked,” he told [his dear friend] Grace Norton, if he returned to Europe with a “thankless ignorance and neglect” of his homeland. He would therefore “see all I can of America and rub it in with unfaltering zeal.” His tour consisted of a month in Saratoga, where he drank the waters and “cunningly noted many of the idiosyncrasies of American civilization”; a week at Lake George; a fortnight at Pomfret, where his parents were on holiday; and a fortnight at Newport.”d

  At least three things are especially striking about this: First, young James considers himself enough of a stranger in the land of his birth that he feels obliged to undertake a field trip, a systematic program of self-education aimed at familiarizing himself with its physical and social features. Second, he proposes to tour an extraordinarily narrow slice of his country. In order to “see all I can of America,” he draws up an itinerary consisting entirely of prosperous resort communities in the Northeast. Third, in addition to boning up on “America” and earning a bit of money, he aims to induce The Nation to subsidize his travel in Europe, the place for which his zeal was truly unfaltering. His six Nation essays on American places leverage seventeen more from England, Scotland, France, Germany, and, most lovingly, Italy.

  Edel’s snapshot provides a glimpse of the strategic genius of James’s generalship of his career. From the beginning, he marched toward greatness in stately fashion, according to an inner schedule. His ambition was vast, his confidence in his art and ability unfathomable. He was his own teacher, his own mentor, his own critic, his own taskmaster. The ultimate result, over time, was a body of work unmatched for filigreed quality as well as sheer quantity. (In the stacks of the Dartmouth College library, I found twenty-five feet of shelf space devoted to the writings of Henry James, with another twenty feet holding books about him.) By the end of the decade during which these essays were written, James would emerge, at thirty-seven, as the mature literary master he would remain for the second half of his life.

  For readers of these Jamesian postcards, then and now, there is welcome relief from the news of the day. The tribulations of war and politics and revolution almost never intrude, and when they do, it is only in a passing reference or offhand phrase. At his Lake George hotel in 1870, relaxing with the New York papers, he is “reading of the great deeds of Prussia and the confusion of France” while listening to a German American marching band. “What an omen for the Prussian future!” he marvels. “Their simple Teutonic presence seemed a portent.” (How much of a portent he could not know.) In Paris in 1872, “after a busy, dusty, weary day in the streets, staring at charred ruins and finding in all things a vague aftertaste of gunpowder,” he attends a Molière comedy at the Théâtre Français. The magnificence of the performance prompts him to feel “a sort of languid ecstasy of contemplation and wonder—wonder that the tender flower of poetry and art should bloom again so bravely over blood-stained garments and fresh-made graves.” (He is alluding to the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune the year before.) But we are not on an earnest fact-finding trip in these essays. We’re not down and out in Paris and London. No, we are up and away in Saratoga and Venice (and Paris and London too). We are traveling for pleasure, and pleasure is what James gives us—pleasure in the places he takes us and, above all, the pleasure of his company.

  To travel with James in these pages is to take an unhurried vacation with a thoroughly seasoned, supremely cultivated, acutely intelligent companion. Our guide is a curious, engaged observer not only of landscapes and streets and cathedrals but also of paintings and plays and the characteristics—national, social, and individual—of the people we encounter at his side. This is a book to read slowly, the better to absorb its sights and sounds, its insights and reflections—a book of walks, with now and then a ride in a horse-drawn carriage, hooves rattling on cobblestones. Word by word, phrase by phrase, James’s long, purposefully meandering, beautifully detailed sentences will guide you around the curves of a country road, up the steps of a moldering castle, into the quiet of a rural inn or the bustle of a grand hotel. Take the advice of your traveling companion:

  To walk in quest of any object that one has more or less tenderly dreamed of—to find your way—to steal upon it softly—to see at last, if it is church or castle, the tower-tops peeping above elms or beeches—to push forward with a rush, and emerge, and pause, and draw that first long breath which is the compromise between so many sensations—this is a pleasure left to the tourist even after the broad glare of photography has dissipated so many of the sweet mysteries of travel.

  So pack your bags. Don’t forget your pocket watch, your deerstalker hat or bonnet, and your steamship tickets. Here’s your Baedeker. Bon voyage!

  a Henry James, “Mr. Walt Whitman,” Nation 1 (November 16, 1865): 1:625–626.

  b Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 599.

  c Henry James to Manton Marble, October 10, 1903, in Henry James: Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 348.

  d Edel, Henry James, 119–120.

  INTRODUCTION: A LITTLE TOUR WITH HENRY JAMES

  Michael Anesko

  MOST PEOPLE WHO KNOW SOMETHING OF HENRY JAMES might also know that, shortly before his death in 1916, he succumbed to a series of debilitating strokes. In their wake, for weeks he drifted in and out of consciousness, but often still capable of speech. While his faithful amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, remained with him, she dutifully recorded the words he spoke—as she had for years, seated at a Remington typewriter while he dictated the texts of his late fiction and much of his voluminous correspondence. In the latter of these fragmentary transcripts from his subconscious, Henry James transported himself back to France—even assuming the name of Napoléone—and declared his ambition to renovate certain apartments of the Louvre and the Tuileries, a grand project that would possess “a majesty unsurpassed by any work of the kind yet undertaken” in the First Empire.a In the strange meandering of his stricken brain, Henry James was completing a lifetime circuit of travel, for his very earliest memoryb was of sitting in a carriage—at two years of age—waggling his small feet under a flowing robe and taking in “the admirable aspect of the Place and the Colonne Vendôme,”c a monument erected in 1810 to commemorate Napoleon Bonaparte’s crushing victories at Austerlitz and Jena. Paris, of course, would provide the setting for some of the Master’s finest work—The Ambassadors (1903), perhaps most notably—but, almost from the beginning, his long shelf of stories and novels mapped out a crisscrossing itinerary of transatlantic scope, often in tandem with his own peripatetic adventures.

  Not long after James’s birth in a house off Washington Square in New York City, his restless father (and namesake) took the family abroad for two years, first to Paris and then to London. The Jameses then spent the next ten years back in the United States, sometimes in Albany—where the paternal grandfather had made a vast fortune—but mostly on the island of Manhattan, whose bustling streets, theaters, and museums afforded the growing boy a prime urban spectacle. Ever wary of our native fixation on business and moneymaking, the elder Henry James still wanted to give his children (as he told Ralph Waldo Emerson) “a better sensuous education” than they were likely to receive in America,d and so he packed the family off again to Europe and distributed his brood, at various times, among schools in Geneva, London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Bonn or hired tutors to proctor them at home as they moved from place to place. Suckled thus in cosmopolitanism, young Henry James was never weaned.

  At the age of twenty-six, Henry James Jr. (as he was th
en known) had already begun a literary career by writing short fiction and noticing current books for periodicals such as the North American Review, The Atlantic, and The Nation. At this point, he made his first solo trip abroad, deliberately choosing to follow an itinerary of his own making. His parents and older brother, William, had wanted him to absorb the rigors of German philosophy (and the tortuosities of the German language), but instead, after spending several months in England, France, and Switzerland, young Henry James crossed the Alps on foot and descended into Italy—a country and a culture still foreign to him, as his parents had never ventured there on any of the family’s previous European forays. Voluminous letters back to Cambridge chart the progress of his travels—as well as his burgeoning enthusiasm. Upon reaching the Eternal City, he gushed, “At last—for the first time—I live! It beats everything: it leaves the Rome of your fancy—your education—nowhere. It makes Venice—Florence—Oxford—London—seem like little cities of pasteboard. I went reeling and moaning thro’ the streets, in a fever of enjoyment.”e With time, those other places easily regained their luster in the young writer’s estimation, and the consecrated experience of them reaffirmed what would become the touchstones of travel for James: close observation, judicious measure, and comparison.

  In 1872, James again had occasion to travel abroad, this time as a male guide and chaperone for his younger sister Alice (1848–1892) and their maternal “Aunt Kate” (Catharine Walsh, 1812–1889). After accompanying the women that summer to what was by then an almost familiar series of destinations in England, France, Switzerland, and Italy, James followed them to Liverpool in October to get them aboard a steamer heading back to America. But now he was determined to stay on and prove to himself (and his overstretched parents!) that he could support himself by his pen and not rely on banker’s drafts from Cambridge to pay for his sojourn. Most of the pieces reprinted in this volume provide fruitful testimony to that ambition as well as confirmation that he could. A quick census of his serial publications from 1872 through 1874 yields a fulsome tally: in those three years he published no fewer than eight short stories, seven notices of art installations or gallery exhibitions, twenty-eight book or theater reviews, and thirty travel sketches. Hardly an idle traveler, Henry James worked at his desk almost everywhere he went.