Citizens of Somewhere Else: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James (review)

Dan McCall. Citizens of Somewhere Else: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. 240 pp. $25.00.

Henry James had already left his native land when he published his 1879 study, Hawthorne, which criticized the earlier writer for "a want of reality and an abuse of the fanciful element." According to Dan McCall, James moved to Europe and adopted realism as "a way out of what trapped his mentor" (6). And yet, McCall argues, "James never forsakes Hawthorne; he returns to him almost obsessively, again and again" (7). This book is an account of that obsession: of how James's prefaces are indebted to Hawthorne's, of how Lambert Strether and Jeffrey Aspern are remarkably similar to the novelist depicted in Hawthorne, of how the origins of The Bostonians and "The Beast in the Jungle" can be found in Hawthorne's works.

McCall argues that Hawthorne grappled in "The Custom-House" with questions about his relation to his homeland, and that of all his novels, only The Scarlet Letter lives up to the "magnitude of the problems raised" in that preface (44). That's because "in ceasing to tread the native soil of that part of the American past to which he felt closest, Hawthorne lost his sense of restrictive place, his great sense of the way the community closes in" (84). McCall's Hawthorne is only ambivalently committed to romance; he uses that form "to mitigate his sense of failing his materials and the best of his own talent" (21). Perhaps this Hawthorne would not have disagreed with James's assessment of his work.

Dan McCall is clearly an outstanding teacher. He writes in an informal, conversational style that gently demonstrates his passion for these two writers, and he frequently approaches his topic as a university instructor, sharing with us, for example, "a long-standing debate with my colleague Jonathan Bishop that to this day we still enjoy" (149). The debate regards what Bishop sees as a flaw in The Portrait of a Lady, and I'm sure it has led to many engaging classroom discussions about the effect on readers of what James chose to withhold from his narration. McCall's discussion is lively and convincing.

The strength of this book is also occasionally its weakness. Like many charismatic teachers, McCall sometimes uses the force of his convictions as their own evidence. Sometimes this habit is less distressing than others. Many readers will enjoy the well-deserved thrust he aims at Eve Sedgwick's infamous reading of "The Beast in the Jungle":

I don't think Sedgwick tells me what I can't or don't want to hear; I think she tells me something false. For example, she writes that at the great culminating scene in the London cemetery, where Marcher sees genuine grief in another mourner's face, "Whitmanian cruisiness seems at first to tinge the air." Oh, surely that is not so. "Whitmanian cruisiness?" This grief-stricken man? (113)

Here McCall, a gifted novelist himself, counts on his audience (and on fellow critics) to read carefully and hear the tones of the tale, and he is often convincing. At other times, however, we want more than his word, as in this claim:

Hawthorne rarely offered art as a way out of specific moral dilemmas; not only his works themselves but also his prefaces, notebooks, and letters show that he felt a terrible incompatibility between esthetic and moral excellence. He approached the notion that one might exclude the other. (37)

McCall supplies no notes and a very limited bibliography, in spite of his comprehensive quotations from other scholars; the reader who is interested in pursuing this topic will have a difficult task finding other sources, though the Hawthorne-James connection has been thoroughly explored by earlier critics, most notably Richard Brodhead.

Another problem with the pedagogical approach is that it leads to frequent digressions. When McCall turns to Lowell...